There's the Urey-Miller experiment which tried to recreate early earth atmospheric conditions, and they succeeded in making DNA and RNA (and also proteins and polysaccharides iirc) from methane, water, hydrogen and ammonia, but I think people later remarked how the early earth atmosphere probably didn't have the conditions required by the Urey-Miller experiment to actually be able to make these molecules.
I'm not an expert on early life origin work, but as a biologist it definitely drew my attention to see uracil being discovered on an asteroid, as AFAIK it's pretty much only formed in nature through biological methods (at least with the current earth conditions it is, as the earth has changed quite a lot over the past 4.5 billion years, so it is possible at one stage that it was formed non-biogically).
Bobthehobnob t1_jd5rlyn wrote
Reply to comment by Brain_Hawk in A crucial building block of life exists on the asteroid Ryugu. Uracil, a component of RNA, was found in a sample collected by Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft. by Science_News
There's the Urey-Miller experiment which tried to recreate early earth atmospheric conditions, and they succeeded in making DNA and RNA (and also proteins and polysaccharides iirc) from methane, water, hydrogen and ammonia, but I think people later remarked how the early earth atmosphere probably didn't have the conditions required by the Urey-Miller experiment to actually be able to make these molecules.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1161527?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%20%200pubmed
I'm not an expert on early life origin work, but as a biologist it definitely drew my attention to see uracil being discovered on an asteroid, as AFAIK it's pretty much only formed in nature through biological methods (at least with the current earth conditions it is, as the earth has changed quite a lot over the past 4.5 billion years, so it is possible at one stage that it was formed non-biogically).