Month: September 2022

THE HYPOTHESIS. “We used systems biology approaches to explore the alternative hypothesis that a protometabolism could have emerged prior to the incorporation of phosphate.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

SAMPLE SIZE. “To obtain insight into the early stages of the evolution of metabolism, prior to LUCA, we analyzed the biosphere-level collection of all known metabolic reactions, which throughout the history of life may have greatly shifted their assortment into organisms.” (LUCA = Last universal common ancestor). https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

PHOSPHATE-FREE METABOLISM. “Surprisingly, we identified a cryptic phosphate-independent core metabolism producible from simple prebiotic compounds. This network is predicted to support the biosynthesis of a broad category of key biomolecules.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

METABOLIC FOSSIL. “Its enrichment for enzymes utilizing iron-sulfur clusters, and the fact that thermodynamic bottlenecks are more readily overcome by thioester rather than phosphate couplings, suggest that this network may constitute a “metabolic fossil” of an early phosphate-free nonenzymatic biochemistry.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

THIOESTER METABOLISM. “Our results corroborate and expand previous proposals that a putative thioester-based metabolism could have predated the incorporation of phosphate and an RNA-based genetic system.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

IN PLAIN SIGHT. “While most research on the evolution of living systems has been focused on sequences and genomes, some answers to fundamental questions about the emergence of life may be hidden in the architecture of the complex biochemical reaction networks that sustain the cell.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

NEW APPLICATIONS. “The field of metabolic network modeling and analysis is expanding as a major research area of relevance to multiple applications. However, the use of such techniques to address fundamental questions on the emergence of living systems is still highly unexplored.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

THE ENIGMA. “Among the many unanswered questions on life’s origin, the enigma of how phosphate ended up playing a prominent role in cellular biochemistry has been puzzling scientists for decades.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

THE GREAT UNKNOWN. “The discovery of a new force in nature is the holy grail of particle physics. Our current understanding of the constituents of the Universe fall remarkably short - we do not know what 95% of the Universe is made of or why there is such a large imbalance between matter and anti-matter." https://lnkd.in/ddjyYm8 View in LinkedIn

The bowed walls of the old town of Girona. View in LinkedIn