Study finds meteoritic sugar ribose helps keep boron dissolved in early Earth waters

By the Everything Space news desk · 30 Sep 2026 · written from the sources below

Image: Phys.org

New lab experiments suggest ribose from meteorites and dissolved boron protected each other, hinting at how RNA's building blocks may have survived on ancient Earth.

Researchers studying the chemical origins of life have found that ribose, a sugar delivered to early Earth by meteorites, may have helped stabilize the very conditions needed for its own survival. The sugar, a key component of RNA, is notoriously fragile and tends to break down when heated, similar to caramelizing table sugar.

Scientists already knew that borate, a boron-containing molecule, can bind to ribose and protect it from breaking down. But experiments testing this effect have typically relied on high concentrations of purified boron that don't match what is found in nature, where boron-rich minerals tend to dissolve poorly and form solid crusts instead of staying in solution.

To address this gap, researchers examined real minerals, including borate crusts collected from hot springs in the Himalayas, alongside ribose. They found that ribose itself helps dissolve borate minerals and prevents them from solidifying into crystals, keeping more boron available in the water for chemical reactions.

This suggests a mutually reinforcing relationship: borate shields ribose from decomposing, while ribose helps keep borate dissolved rather than locked away in mineral form. Such an interaction could have been significant on early Earth, a world with little atmospheric oxygen, extensive volcanic activity, and frequent meteorite impacts delivering carbon-based molecules, including sugars, from space.

The Murchison meteorite, which fell in Australia, has previously been shown to contain ribose along with other sugars, offering a real-world example of the kind of material that may have reached early Earth in large quantities during that period of bombardment.

The researchers note that other molecules capable of binding borate, such as ethylene glycol and glycerol, could have played similar roles, and that interactions between primordial organic soups and common minerals like silica and calcium may also warrant investigation. They suggest that nonliving carbon compounds might have shaped mineral formation on Earth even before life existed, a dynamic they compare to the way living organisms today influence geology by building shells and coral skeletons.

Written in Everything Space’s own words by our news-desk model from the sources above, and checked against them in code: every number in this report appears in its sources, and no sentence is copied from them.