Abstract
INVESTIGATIONS of the extractable organic material found in the Murchison meteorite, a carbonaceous chondrite, have led to the identification of many different classes of compounds, including amino acids1–5, hydrocarbons3,6,7, heterocycles which contain nitrogen8,9, and monocarboxylic acids10. We report here a large suite of aliphatic dicarboxylic acids found in extracts from the chondrite. This suite includes many of the branched and straight chained isomers with up to nine carbon atoms. The large number of compounds and the isomeric distribution suggest that, like the amino acids, they are the product of an abiotic synthesis.
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LAWLESS, J., ZEITMAN, B., PEREIRA, W. et al. Dicarboxylic acids in the Murchison meteorite. Nature 251, 40–42 (1974). https://doi.org/10.1038/251040a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/251040a0
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