Hi All

Plasmas and dust can do some tricky things. First it was 'plasma crystals' - ordered structures of charged dust in a plasma. Now it seems inorganic helices with properties similar to DNA can be formed from dust-in-plasma...

< href="http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070814_plasma_life.html">Hot Gas in Space Mimics Life

...which suggests that some kind of life might be feasible in free-space plasma/dust mixtures. Since plasma fills so much of the Universe is still plasma the article speculates most life might actually be in space.

Maybe. Less speculatively such long chains of dust might explain coagulation of larger masses in stellar protoplanetary nebulas, once the dust has collected in the mid-plane. Electrostatics has long been implicated and this work just adds to the overall picture.