The building blocks of life are, well, the "blocks" that help make up "life". These include proteins, lipids, nucleic acids, etc. The secret behind how these things combined help create life was a mystery, until chemists conducted thorough research on water!
Life on Earth began with the arrival of liquid water, but the chemistry behind it remained unknown until researchers now discovered the peptide-forming reactions (peptides help form proteins) in water microdroplets.
As context, although liquid water is essential to life, too much water doesn't allow raw amino acids to react and link up to peptides, which form the fabric of protein, the essential ingredients for life.
So how did life happen?
A key distinction is that, water is not wet everywhere! At the boundary where the ocean's surface meets the atmosphere, the water microdroplets are dry, allowing for amino acids to lose water to form peptides through dehydration synthesis, which then forms protein (dehydration synthesis is a reaction in which water is removed in order for two substances to combine together)!
Since the rate of the reaction was incredibly high, it did not require any prior proteins to speed up the reaction, called catalysts, ultimately making the evolution of life possible!
As these first proteins began combining and producing more proteins, life began accelerating. Eventually, the first life was formed, and then the next, and then the next! All the way up until we are today, billions of years later.
Ultimately, our life started from the water. All life.
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