Asteroid provides sweet clues to life's origins

Ribose and glucose detected in pristine dust samples from the asteroid Bennu

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In a major new discovery, scientists have detected bio-essential sugars – including ribose and, for the first time in an extraterrestrial source, glucose – in pristine samples returned to Earth from asteroid Bennu by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft.

The international team of US, Japanese and NASA researchers found ribose – the sugar backbone of RNA – and glucose, the six-carbon sugar that fuels living cells on Earth.