Phosphorus is vital to life on Earth, even though our planet doesn’t provide us with very much phosphorus to work with. A team of astrobiologists, led by Matthew Pasek of the University of South Florida, is now studying how phosphorus biochemistry may have originated at the dawn of life. Their work is being supported by NASA’s Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology program.

Phosphorous is scarce on the Earth, particularly at the surface, and is primarily found in some type of phosphate. Pasek’s team hopes to provide the phosphorus chemical landscape through the first two billion years of Earth’s geologic history. This could help uncover when and how life came to depend so strongly on this element.

“Once life developed the molecular machinery that allowed incorporation of phosphorus, and even the ‘harvesting’ of phosphorus, life would have moved to a higher level,” says team member Nicholas Hud of Georgia Tech. “The inclusion of phosphate likely represented a major evolutionary advance in life (if it was not there at the very beginning) and therefore is extremely important for understanding the origin and early evolution of life.”