New Delhi (PTI): Volcanic eruptions and subsequent release of gases may have produced necessary chemical components that triggered the first spark of life, said a new study.

Lightning and the release of gases associated with volcanic eruptions could have produced the necessary chemical components to give rise to early life, suggest the findings of "The Miller Volcanic Spark Experiment," published in the latest issue of journal Science.

The inference were drawn by a team of researchers led by Jeffrey Bada at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego after reanalysing Stanley Miller's classic origin of life experiment.

Miller's experiment circulates methane, ammonia, water vapour and hydrogen in a closed apparatus, simulating the earth's early atmosphere and gives a lightning-like spark through it.

After some days, organic compounds are observed in the mixture, suggesting that Earth's primitive atmosphere may have given rise to life.

Bada, along with lead author of the paper Adam Johnson and others, reanalysed original chemical samples of Miller's experiment, discovered after his death in 2007, to determine if some other earlier unidentified, new chemical compounds could be detected in them using modern equipment.

They found that a modern day version of the volcanic apparatus produces a wider variety of compounds and offer a new approach on origin of the essential building blocks of life.

"We believed there was more to learn from Miller's original experiment," said Bada, whose lab is the first to perform follow up studies using Miller's original apparatus and chemicals samples.

The team restudied 11 of the original samples using contemporary analytical chemistry techniques and found that 22 amino acids, the building blocks of proteins essential for origin of life, were produced and 10 of these were new and not discussed by Miller in his experiment.

Adam Johnson, an Indiana University graduate student with the NASA Astrobiology Institute team said, "historically, you don't get many experiments that might be more famous than these. They redefined our thoughts on the origin of life and showed unequivocally that the fundamental building blocks of life could be derived from natural processes.

Miller's classic "primordial soup" experiment is still widely used today in high school chemistry labs to mimic chemical reactions that occur in vapor-rich volcanic eruptions.

It is commonly believed that Earth initially comprised many small volcanic islands.