Chemistry’s Daniel Strongin will be part of a research team based at Montana State University that will focus on the origins of life and investigate the role of metal sulfides in the transition from the non-living to the living world.

The seven-member collaborative research team, which also includes researchers from SUNY-Stony Brook, will be part of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute. The team will receive more than $6 million in support from NASA over the next five years, with Strongin and Temple expected to receive approximately $500,000.

“Our objective is to look at the chemistry of metal sulfides and whether they could have helped facilitate the assembly of molecules that later went on to form biological systems,” said Strongin.

Strongin, whose lab has expertise in working with metal sulfides, points out that very hot metal sulfides are constantly being spewed forth at great depths onto the ocean floor by volcanic vents.

“It has been hypothesized that conditions down there, which are very high-pressure and high-temperature, allows these metal sulfides to assemble molecules that later participate in the formation of biological systems,” he said.

The formation of the collaborative team is a well-defined effort to try to understand the chemistry that you can do under these conditions, he explained. “We want to spectroscopically investigate this process to understand how it is happening.”

Strongin added that understanding what is happening may provide a link between the non-living and living worlds through enzymes.

“It turns out that the enzymes that make biological systems work sometimes have active sites or an assembly of iron and sulfur that closely mimic what are in these metal sulfide minerals,” he said. “It has been hypothesized that these iron sulfide minerals somehow provided nature with a way of forming these same centers in enzymes.”

Strongin said NASA is interested in this research not only from a basic science perspective, but also because it wants to better understand the signatures of life on other planets.

The Montana State-based research team is one of four recently announced by NASA —University of Wisconsin–Madison, California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology were the others — and brings the total number of teams within NASA’s Astrobiology Institute to 16.

“These teams have proposed exciting research that is complementary to work being done by other NAI members,” said NAI Director Carl Pilcher of the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “The selection of these teams forms an excellent foundation for entering the institute’s second decade.”

More than 500 research scientists work in these 16 teams, with a strong focus on public education and the training of the next generation of astrobiologists. The basic research carried out in the institute directly supports many NASA missions, such as exploration of Mars and the search for planets around other stars, including investigations of the habitability of other worlds.