Uracil, a building block of life, has been found on the asteroid Ryugu.
Yasuhiro Oba and colleagues discovered the precursor to life in samples collected from the asteroid and returned to Earth by Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft, the team reports March 21 in Nature Communications.
“The detection of uracil in the Ryugu sample is very important to clearly demonstrate that it is really present in extraterrestrial environments,” says Oba, an astrochemist at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan.
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Uracil had been previously detected in samples from meteorites,
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