Niels Ligterink: Prebiotic building blocks: From interstellar observations to laboratory synthesis

Prebiotic molecules show chemical similarities with biologically relevant molecules, such as amino acids, nucleobases, sugars and peptide chains, and are thought to be involved in their formation.  The interstellar presence of prebiotic molecules has led to the idea that biotic molecules on Earth may have derived from these interstellar molecules.

In this seminar, observations of prebiotics towards the young sun-like protobinary IRAS 16293-2422 are presented, showing that prebiotic molecules likely were present at the earliest formational stages of our Solar system. Solid-state formation pathways of these molecules are investigated in the laboratory and show that much of the prebiotic inventory can derive from reactions on icy dust grains.