A research team claimed to have found the first known extraterrestrial protein, spotting it in a space rock that fell to Earth 30 years ago.
The scientists, led by Malcolm McGeoch of the Plex Corp. in Fall River, Massachusetts, analyzed the meteorite Acfer 086, which landed in Algeria in 1990. High-precision mass spectrometry revealed the presence of a novel protein, McGeoch and his team wrote in a new paper that’s available on the online preprint site arXiv.org.
The protein, which the researchers proposed calling “hemolithin,” consists of chains of the amino acids glycine and hydroxyglycine, as well as iron, oxygen and lithium atoms, the researchers reported. And the hemolithin is significantly enriched in deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen that features a neutron in its atomic nucleus along with a proton. (The nucleus of a “normal” hydrogen atom has a proton but no neutron).
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