Researchers Demonstrate 2020 Early-Earth Reactions Supporting Metabolism-First Origin of Life
Updated
Updated · Quanta Magazine · Nov 12
Researchers Demonstrate 2020 Early-Earth Reactions Supporting Metabolism-First Origin of Life
3 articles · Updated · Quanta Magazine · Nov 12
Summary
Lab experiments reported by William Martin’s team showed hydrothermal-vent chemicals—carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and iron-nickel minerals—can produce formate, acetate and pyruvate, key building blocks of the acetyl-CoA metabolic pathway.
Those results bolster the metabolism-first view that self-sustaining energy reactions may have preceded genes, RNA and cells, giving early chemistry a way to generate increasingly complex organic molecules.
A separate 2020 study by Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy’s group found pyruvate and glyoxylate could assemble most components of the reverse citric acid cycle under milder conditions and without metal catalysts.
The competing demonstrations suggest early metabolism may have begun in hydrothermal vents or in less extreme surface settings, but researchers still lack a clear account of how such reactions stabilized, linked to heredity and coexisted inside primitive membranes.