EARLY microbes may have used lightning to cook their dinner.
When lightning strikes sand or sediment, it can fuse the particles together. A new analysis of these glassy remnants, or fulgurites, suggests that lightning fries the nutrient phosphorus into a more digestible form.
Most phosphorus on Earth exists as oxidised phosphate, but many microbes prefer a rarer, partially oxidised phosphorus 鈥� phosphite. Matthew Pasek and Kristin Block of the University of Arizona in Tucson used an MRI scanner on 10 and found that five contained phosphite.
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They suggest the high energy of a lightning strike strips an oxygen atom from phosphate compounds, creating phosphites (Nature Geoscience, ). 鈥淓arly life may have used phosphite to form its key biomolecules, like RNA and DNA,鈥� says Pasek.