God fashioned man from clay?

Two of the crucial components for the origin of life - genetic material and cell membranes - could have been introduced to one another by a lump of clay, new experiments have shown.

The study of montmorillonite clay, by Martin Hanczyc, Shelly Fujikawa and Jack Szostak at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, revealed it can sharply accelerate the formation of membranous fluid-filled sacs.

These vesicles also grow and undergo a simple form of division, giving them the properties of primitive cells. Previous work has shown that the same simple mineral can help assemble the genetic material RNA from simpler chemicals. 'Interestingly, the clay also gets internalised in the vesicles,' says Leslie Orgel, an origin of life expert at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in San Diego, California. 'So this work is quite nice in that it finds a connection between the mechanism that creates RNA and encloses it in a membrane.'"

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