Read New Clues to Chemical Origins of Metabolism at Dawn of Life by John Rennie (Quanta Magazine)

The ingredients for reactions ancestral to metabolism could have formed very easily in the primordial soup, new work suggests.

they found that the glyoxylate and pyruvate reacted to make a range of compounds that included chemical analogues to all the intermediary products in the TCA cycle except for citric acid. Moreover, these products all formed in water within a single reaction vessel, at temperatures and pH conditions mild enough to be compatible with conditions on Earth. ❧

Annotated on October 13, 2020 at 10:20PM