

Homemade lab equipment simulating chemical evolution on early Earth - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/27/dark-matter/the-dawn-of-life-in-a-5-toaster-oven

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x3n0ph3n3
How do they prevent contamination from existing organisms?

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jessaustin
Presumably they start with sterile trays, plates, syringes, etc. The toaster
isn't airtight, but though the whole apparatus could be housed in an airtight
vessel, they're probably relying on the 85C temperature to kill most things.

Also, they're not testing the production of microbes, but rather that of
polymers. They know if something comes out that they didn't put in.

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lawpoop
I don't know much about chemistry, but how would they know if an interesting
polymer arose of the interaction of the simple chemicals they put in there,
versus the breakdown of a bacterial membrane at 85C interacting with the
things already there?

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jessaustin
ISTM that when they balance the chemical equations they'll know if relatively-
large masses of "output" chemicals were in some way affected by trace amounts
of foreign "input" chemicals, whether the source of those was biological or
something else.

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sandworm101
I was going to add to those spotting the risk of contamination but then
realized my error. This is an accurate model. The earth wasn't a sealed
environment. The earth was and is constantly bombarded by foreign substances.
Not a month goes by that I'm not reading about some new organic chemistry in
space.

That face on mars shows us that life most certainly was brought to earth from
elsewhere. So if this machine is contaminated by some student's dandruff then
it's only all the more accurate a simulation.

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jimrybarski
Earth was a sealed environment, but it was also completely sterile. Exposing
the experiments to a large amount of cells of any kind would totally distort
their results.

