One of the unresolved issues in astrophysics and astrochemistry is to understand how prebiotic molecules assemble into complex structures and establish which ones are the necessary conditions for life to arise and evolve on Earth and in the exoplanets.  Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, constituents essential to all organisms and therefore fundamental to life as Know.  In fact, amino acids have been identified in carbonaceous meteorites in concentrations of up to 3 parts per million relative to carbon (see e.g. Cronin and Chang 1993, Botha and Bada 2002, Elsila et al. 2009). Which shows that they were present in the protoplanetary material from which meteorites and ultimately meteorites formed planets. How those relatively complex molecules originated remains an enigma.

The formation of amino acids in the interstellar medium is in principle possible by specific gas-phase reactions in dark clouds (Enhrenfreund and Charnley 2000). The possibility that they originate in chemical reactions in the molecular clouds where they are born stars and their planetary systems have motivated numerous searches for amino acids in these regions which have proved controversial and inconclusive.  But these searches are have performed mainly with radio telescopes working at wavelengths Millimeter. Since amino acids can absorb ultraviolet radiation and re-emit this energy in the infrared (IR), particularly through its rich vibrational spectrum of medium IR (Iglesias-Groth and Cataldo 2018, 2020), in this project we propose to perform searches for amino acids in the interstellar medium using, for the first time, its main vibrational bands in the IR middle. 

Many of the 20 amino acids that make up the key proteins of life in the Earth has a vibrational spectrum with numerous transitions between 10 and 40 microns (more of 10 bands in each case), which may allow their identification in formation regions stellar using spectrographs of sufficient spectral resolution aboard satellites. In a preliminary analysis we have performed using spectroscopic data from the telescope Spitzer found evidence of the presence of at least five amino acids in the interstellar medium of the molecular cloud of Perseus, one of the star-forming regions closest to the Solar System.  With this project we intend to:

a) carry out a systematic work on Spitzer's IRS infrared spectrometer database in the region spectral of 10-40 microns, to try to identify the remaining 15 amino acids in the Perseus molecular complex; 

(b) extend the work to five other training regions of stars and the proto-planetary disks they contain;

(c) develop quantitative techniques for spectral analysis, using radiation transport models that allow inferring the abundances of these molecules in the aforementioned regions;

(d) obtaining in the laboratory the fundamental molecular parameters necessary for these calculations, in particular molar absorptivity that allow to determine the Einstein coefficients of all the observable transitions, this will be done with a collaborating laboratory in Rome with which we have already developed the first measurements for five amino acids (Iglesias-Groth and Cataldo, 2020 Astrobiology); 

e) it is also intended to use the new JWST space telescope with excellent spectral resolution in the medium IR and extraordinary sensitivity to confirm and refine the amino acid identification obtained with the Spitzer telescope in the region of Perseus and others that are under study.