Version 1
: Received: 20 February 2023 / Approved: 22 February 2023 / Online: 22 February 2023 (06:17:06 CET)
Version 2
: Received: 20 March 2023 / Approved: 20 March 2023 / Online: 20 March 2023 (04:36:39 CET)
How to cite:
Potiszil, C.; Yamanaka, M.; Ota, T.; Tanaka, R.; Kobayashi, K.; Nakamura, E. Detection of Meteoritic Amino Acids in Extremely Small Sample Sizes: Implications for Sample Return Missions. Preprints2023, 2023020374. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202302.0374.v2
Potiszil, C.; Yamanaka, M.; Ota, T.; Tanaka, R.; Kobayashi, K.; Nakamura, E. Detection of Meteoritic Amino Acids in Extremely Small Sample Sizes: Implications for Sample Return Missions. Preprints 2023, 2023020374. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202302.0374.v2
Potiszil, C.; Yamanaka, M.; Ota, T.; Tanaka, R.; Kobayashi, K.; Nakamura, E. Detection of Meteoritic Amino Acids in Extremely Small Sample Sizes: Implications for Sample Return Missions. Preprints2023, 2023020374. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202302.0374.v2
APA Style
Potiszil, C., Yamanaka, M., Ota, T., Tanaka, R., Kobayashi, K., & Nakamura, E. (2023). Detection of Meteoritic Amino Acids in Extremely Small Sample Sizes: Implications for Sample Return Missions. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202302.0374.v2
Chicago/Turabian Style
Potiszil, C., Katsura Kobayashi and Eizo Nakamura. 2023 "Detection of Meteoritic Amino Acids in Extremely Small Sample Sizes: Implications for Sample Return Missions" Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202302.0374.v2
Abstract
Unmetamorphosed carbonaceous chondrites provide important information concerning the formation and evolution of organic matter, such as amino acids. However, terrestrial contamination remains a valid concern when investigating the organic inventory of meteorites that have fallen to Earth. Accordingly, JAXA’s Hayabusa2 and NASA’s OSIRIS-REx have been launched with the task of returning uncontaminated C-type asteroid material to Earth. The successful Hayabusa2 mission has a very limited sample size (5.4 g). Therefore, many conventional compound specific techniques will struggle to detect amino acids above detection limit with available sample amounts (~several mg to 10’s of mg) being much smaller than those typically used. Here a novel method utilizing ultrahigh performance liquid chromatography-Orbitrap-mass spectrometry is validated and applied to very small meteorite samples, thus providing an approach that can overcome the small sample size constraints of sample return missions. The method is highly sensitive, enabling the detection of amino acids in the carbonaceous chondrites Murchison (2.28 mg) and Orgueil (2.30 mg). Furthermore, quantitation was possible for many of the detected amino acids in Murchison and Orgueil. Using the data presented here, both the amino acid reservoirs of Murchison and Orgueil and the potential application of this method to sample return samples are discussed.
Keywords
Carbonaceous chondrite; sample return; amino acid; ultrahigh performance liquid chromatography; Orbitrap-mass spectrometry; organic matter; astrobiology; origin of life
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Biology and Biotechnology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Received:
20 March 2023
Commenter:
Christian Potiszil
Commenter's Conflict of Interests:
Author
Comment:
The extraction and analytical procedure was repeated with serpentine procedural blanks and using a different sample of Murchison. The chosen Murchison sample had a better curation history and yielded much lower levels of tyrosene and phenylalanine, as well as glycine and beta-alanine, which indicated it had experienced very low levels of terrestrial contamination.
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Commenter: Christian Potiszil
Commenter's Conflict of Interests: Author