Zoe Todd is among the co-authors of a study that helps to explain how some of the earliest building blocks of life could have emerged from the stew of chemicals that existed on the early Earth. Photo by Rose Lincoln, Harvard Staff Photographer.

A mixture of cyanide and copper, when irradiated with UV light, could have produced simple sugars that formed the building blocks of life on early Earth. This is according to Harvard graduate student Zoe Todd and Dimitar Sasselov, the Phillips Professor of Astronomy and director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative.

In a paper published this week in the journal Chemical Communications, the researchers state that in order to make something like an RNA nucleotide, you need such simple sugars.