Question: You say that you study organic compounds in meteorites, what do you mean by this? Are you looking for certain chemicals such as DNA, proteins etc or are you doing something different?

Roy Adkin answered on 10 Mar 2014:

Excellent question Rory! Thank you…
Okay, so organic compounds are those which contain carbon (although carbon dioxide, carbon sulfide and the like are not classed as organic, they are inorganic). Scientists are not totally sure how the chemical reactions take place, or even where in space, but the small inorganic compounds react to make the larger organic ones. That is how and where is part of what I am trying to work out.
Now, meteorites are chunks of asteroids and smashed up debris in space which form from all the same stuff that the solar system is made of. There are ones made of iron and nickel (from the core of an asteroid) there are some stony metal ones (from the core/mantle boundary) and stony ones from the crust. There can be organic compounds in the stony meteorites. There are other types of meteorites called carbonaceous condrites and these are basically like rice crispy cakes. Lots of bits all stuck together which also happen to include organic compounds as part of the mix.
It is these organic compounds I want to try and identify and locate.
There wont be any DNA in there though, only the building blocks that could make DNA; amino acids, carboxylic acids, nucleobases (purines and pyrimidine’s) and others such as alkenes and polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAH’s). The DNA building blocks are the most interesting and there really isn’t very much in the meteorites so those are the ones I want to look at. There are many more compounds too but I suggest if you are interested you should Google all the names and perhaps search for ‘organic compounds in carbonaceous condrites’…there are some pretty good websites.
I hope that’s answered your question…but if you’re anything like me it will just make more questions!!
Good luck in whatever you want to do in life 🙂