Southwest Research Institute Research Scientist Dr. Danna Qasim, along with a research team from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., posits that interstellar cloud conditions may have played a significant role on the presence of key building blocks of life in the solar system. To determine to what extent amino acids formed from asteroid conditions and to what extent they were inherited from the interstellar molecular cloud, Qasim and her team simulated the formation of amines and amino acids as it would occur in the interstellar molecular cloud, forming an organic residue. She then processed the residue under asteroid relevant conditions, also known as aqueous alteration.