Could Iron Be The Key To Finding Alien Life On Other Worlds ?

Scientists have highlighted the key role that iron has played in the evolution of life on Earth.

Two Oxford University researchers – Hal Drakesmith, a professor of iron biology, and Jon Wade, an associate professor of planetary materials – have put forward the idea that looking at the amount of iron on other worlds could indicate the potential for complex life there.

Our red blood is full of iron. We need iron for growth and for immunity. It is even added to foodstuffs, such as cereals, to ensure that there is enough of this nutrient in the diet to prevent iron deficiency.

However, on a very different scale, during the development of life on planet Earth over billions of years, iron deficiency may have stimulated evolution. According to our new research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), rising and falling levels of iron on our planet may have enabled complex organisms to evolve from simpler forebears.

The terrestrial planets in our solar system – Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars – have different amounts of iron in their rocky mantles, the layer below the outermost planetary crust.

Mercury’s mantle has the least amount of iron, and Mars’ has the most. This variation is due to differences in distance from the Sun. It is also down to the varying conditions under which the planets initially formed their metallic, iron-rich cores.

The amount of iron in the mantle regulates several planetary processes, including the retention of surface water. And without water, life as we know it cannot exist. Astronomical observations of other solar systems may enable estimates of a planet’s mantle iron, helping to narrow the search for planets capable of harbouring life.

As well as contributing to planetary habitability, iron is fundamental for the biochemistry that allows life to happen. Iron has a unique combination of properties, including the ability to form chemical bonds in multiple orientations and relative ease of gaining or losing one electron.

As a result, iron mediates many biochemical processes in cells, especially by enabling catalysis – a process that speeds up chemical reactions. Metabolic processes that are vital to life, such as DNA synthesis and cellular energy generation, rely on iron.

In our work, we calculated the amount of iron in Earth’s seas over billions of years. We then considered the effect on evolution of enormous amounts of iron falling out of the seas.

Iron through the ages

The initial formative events of geochemistry evolving into biochemistry, life, took place more than 4 billion years ago. And there is an consensus that iron was a pivotal element for this process.

The conditions of early Earth were very different to those now. In particular, there was almost no oxygen in the atmosphere, which meant that iron was easily soluble in water as “ferrous iron” (Fe2+). The abundance of nutritious iron in the Earth’s early seas helped life to evolve. However, this “ferrous paradise” was not to last.

The Great Oxygenation Event resulted in the appearance of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere. It occurred from around 2.43 billion years ago. This changed the surface of Earth and caused a profound loss of soluble iron from the upper ocean and surface waters of the planet.

A second, more recent “oxygenation event”, the Neoproterozoic, occurred between 800 to 500 million years ago. This raised oxygen concentrations yet higher. As a consequence of these two events, oxygen combined with iron and gigatons of oxidised, insoluble, “ferric iron” (Fe3+) dropped out of ocean waters, becoming unavailable to most lifeforms.

Life had developed – and maintains – an inescapable dependency on iron. The loss of access to soluble iron had major consequences for the evolution of life on Earth. Behaviour that optimised the acquisition and use of iron would have had a clear selective advantage. We can still see this in genetic analysis of infections today: bacterial variants able to efficiently scavenge iron from their hosts do better than less able competitors over a few short generations.

A key weapon in this battle for iron was the “siderophore” – a small molecule produced by many bacteria that captures oxidised iron (Fe3+). Siderophores became spectacularly more useful after oxygenation, enabling organisms to assimilate iron from minerals containing oxidised iron. However, siderophores also helped steal iron from other organisms, including bacteria.

This switch in focus, from acquiring iron from the environment to stealing it from other lifeforms, set up a new dynamic of competitive interaction between pathogens and their hosts.

Thanks to this process, both parties continually evolved to attack and defend their iron resources. Over millions of years, this powerful competitive drive led to increasingly complex behaviour, resulting in more advanced organisms.

However, other strategies, besides theft, can help deal with the dependency on a sparse nutrient. One such example is symbiotic, cooperative relationships that share resources. Mitochondria are iron-rich, energy-generating machines that were originally bacteria but now reside in our cells.

Multiple cells clumping together as complex organisms enable more efficient use of rare nutrients than single-celled organisms, such as bacteria. For example, humans recycle 25 times as much iron per day as we take in from our diet.

From an iron-biased view, infection, symbiosis and multicellularity provided different but elegant means for lifeforms to counteract the limitation of iron. The need for iron may have shaped evolution – including life as we know it today.

Earth demonstrates the importance of being ironic. The combination of both an early Earth with biologically accessible iron and the subsequent removal of iron during surface oxidation, has provided unique environmental pressures facilitating the evolution of complex life from simpler precursors.

These specific sets of conditions and changes over such long timescales are possibly uncommon on other planets. The likelihood of other advanced lifeforms being found in our cosmic neighbourhood may therefore be low. Yet looking at the iron abundance on other worlds could also help us find such rare worlds.

Hal Drakesmith, Professor of Iron Biology, University of Oxford and Jon Wade, Associate Professor of Planetary Materials, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Jake Carter

Jake Carter is a journalist and a most prolific writer who has been fascinated by science and unexplained since childhood.

He is not afraid to challenge the official narratives and expose the cover-ups and lies that keep us in the dark. He is always eager to share his findings and insights with the readers of anomalien.com, a website he created in 2013.

2 Comments

  1. Sorry for the type order below I thought it may be relative to iron and its role at the end of the universe and how hypothethcal aliens may exist accord to Dyson.
    I dont believe in aliens. I believe ufos are projections miracles worked by the false prophet but fake and displayed in the presence of the antichrist. And the great battle is ahead and the proof is as humans sink they turn to more drugs and the new god high is frog poison. Its prophetic. Revelations. And I saw three spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon and the beast and the false prophet. These are devils.
    The world can not supplement drugs for morals they will just need a new drug like another reptilian poison like snake.

  2. That is very very interesting.
    At the end of the universe when the universe is dead it will be a very cold time in the universe and quantum affects will rule the universe.
    Quantum tunneling will than begin to allow light elements to fuse into unstable forms of iron. This will decay giving off faints amounts of energy. At this time iron stars will form be the only thing to form.
    Beyond this nucleons the name given to protons and nutrons will cease to exist together. This is the end to life in the universe because everything is made of nucleons there will no chance of humans living.
    Black holes will take over. Black holes will refuel the universe with photons and gravitons.
    A new form of atom begins called positronium.
    They exist as large as the distant of the universe.
    This begins something that has never been seen. A new alien life form begins.
    They would be huge spanning intersteller distances and for them to process one thought it would take trillions of years.
    By this time it is the end of the universe and physics as we know it will be over.

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