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How do they prevent contamination from existing organisms?
by x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
How do they prevent contamination from existing organisms?
- jessaustin 11y agoPresumably 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.
- lawpoop 11y agoI 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?
- jessaustin 11y agoISTM 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.
- x3n0ph3n3 11y agoHow sterile is "sterile"? We can reduce microbiota to so many parts per billion, but afaik they can never be fully removed from an environment. Won't any contamination from microbiota dramatically effect such an experiment. It may very well be that the conditions for the abiogenesis required no other life to be present.
- jimrybarski 11y agoThey could have run control experiments where they didn't actually start the reaction and just looked at how much background polymer to expect from contamination. Of course, if there's a lot it would drown out any signal they got in the actual experiments, but if you get an order of magnitude more polymer then you can be confident you're not seeing an artifact.