Amino Acid Discovered in Comet Dust ↦

NASA’s unmanned spacecraft Stardust collected material from the tail of comet Wild 2 and brought that material back to Earth. After careful examination of that material, scientists working on the project discovered the amino acid glycine:

“The discovery of glycine in a comet supports the idea that the fundamental building blocks of life are prevalent in space, and strengthens the argument that life in the universe may be common rather than rare,” said Carl Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, which co-funded the research.

Proteins are the workhorse molecules of life, used in everything from structures like hair to enzymes, the catalysts that speed up or regulate chemical reactions. Just as the 26 letters of the alphabet are arranged in limitless combinations to make words, life uses 20 different amino acids in a huge variety of arrangements to build millions of different proteins.