ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Discovery in space of ethanolamine, the simplest phospholipid head group.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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9 citing papers in PubMed, 118 citations in OpenAlex.
- Catalytic non-energetic formation of diverse peptides on cosmic dust under extraterrestrial conditions.Communications chemistry · 2026Article
- Detection of a four-carbon sugar in interstellar space.Nature astronomy · 2026Article
- Astrochemical Significance of CThe journal of physical chemistry. A · 2025Article
- The astrochemical evolutionary traits of phospholipid membrane homochirality.Nature reviews. Chemistry · 2024Review
- Infrared Spectroscopy of Neutral and Cationic Benzonitrile-Methanol Binary Clusters in Supersonic Jets.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- About the Formation of NHMolecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- The emergence of interstellar molecular complexity explained by interacting networks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- A Computational Quantum-Based Perspective on the Molecular Origins of Life's Building Blocks.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- Synthesis of methanediol [CHProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
12 authors at 4 institutions in 4 countries.
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Abstract
Cell membranes are a key element of life because they keep the genetic material and metabolic machinery together. All present cell membranes are made of phospholipids, yet the nature of the first membranes and the origin of phospholipids are still under debate. We report here the presence of ethanolamine in space, [Formula: see text]OH, which forms the hydrophilic head of the simplest and second-most-abundant phospholipid in membranes. The molecular column density of ethanolamine in interstellar space is N = (1.51[Formula: see text]0.07)[Formula: see text], implying a molecular abundance with respect to [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text] Previous studies reported its presence in meteoritic material, but they suggested that it is synthesized in the meteorite itself by decomposition of amino acids. However, we find that the proportion of the molecule with respect to water in the interstellar medium is similar to the one found in the meteorite ([Formula: see text]). These results indicate that ethanolamine forms efficiently in space and, if delivered onto early Earth, could have contributed to the assembling and early evolution of primitive membranes.
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