Astrobiologists in Germany are developing a new testing device that could help tease dormant alien microbes into revealing themselves — and its key ingredient is a common amino acid that’s found in abundance inside human blood.
“L-serine, this particular amino acid that we used, […] we can build it in our bodies, ourselves,” researcher Max Riekeles, who is helping to develop the alien-hunting device, told Mashable.
The compound is also prevalent across Earth’s oceans and even down near the dark and otherworldly ecosystems that surround deep sea hydrothermal vents, where life evolved far away from anywhere it could feed itself via photosynthesis. NASA investigators too have found L-serine and similar “proteinogenic” amino acids — which are vital to many organisms’ ability to synthesize their own proteins — buried within meteorites. These and other discoveries have left scientists wondering if any off-world amino acids might have once helped life evolve elsewhere out in the cosmos.
“It could be a simple way to look for life on future Mars missions,” according to Riekeles, who trained as an aerospace engineer at the Technical University of Berlin, where he now works on extraterrestrial biosignature research.
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