Life on Earth may have originated as the organic filling in a multilayer sandwich of mica sheets, according to Helen Hansma of the National Science Foundation and the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In a presentation at the American Society for Cell Biology’s 47th annual meeting, she proposes that the narrow, confined spaces between nonliving mica layers could have provided exactly the right conditions for the rise of the first biomolecules.
The “mica hypothesis” provides possible answers to many questions about life’s origins, according to Hansma. This layered mineral could have provided support, shelter, and an energy source for the development of precellular life, while leaving artifacts in the structure of living things today, including the periodicity of RNA. Mica’s many adjacent compartments
