Liv kan ha uppstått i mineralet glimmer
Glimmer har sådan egenskaper att livet kan ha börjat där. Bland annat ger lagren lagom mycket utrymme för oskyddad molekylutveckling, och det finns kemiska likheter med god miljö för organiskt liv.
A biophysicist, Hansma has worked with mica for decades beginning with her work in biological Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) in the late 1980s. “We put our samples on mica, because it is so atomically flat, so flat that we can see even bare DNA molecules as little ridges on the mica surface,” said Hansma. “The layered mineral is made of sheets so thin (one nanometer) that there are a million of them in a millimeter-thick sheet of mica.”
Hansma came upon her idea one day last spring when she was splitting some mica under her dissecting microscope. She had collected the specimens in a mica mine in Connecticut. The mica was covered with organic material. “As I was looking at the organic crud on the mica, it occurred to me that this would be a good place for life to originate –– between these sheets that can move up and down in response to water currents which would have provided the mechanical energy for making and breaking bonds,” said Hansma.
She summed up her hypothesis of the origin of life by saying, “I picture all the molecules of early life evolving and rearranging among mica sheets in a communal fashion for eons before budding off with cell membranes and spreading out to populate the world.”