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POTENTIAL HUGENESS. “The existence of wandering IMBHs in high-mass galaxies will create a reservoir of IMBH-SMBH mergers waiting to happen. While some IMBHs will have dynamical friction timescales longer than a Hubble time, others will have orbits that decay and bring them into the centers of their hosts.” (IMBHs = intermediate mass black holes; SMBH = supermassive black holes). https://lnkd.in/dYX7TQV View in LinkedIn

METABOLIC SAMPLE. “The resulting scope of this seed set consists of a fully connected network of 315 reactions and 260 metabolites, the composition of which is robust to variations of the seed set compounds.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

SEED SET. “Importantly, the set of seed molecules we defined contains simple carboxylic acids in the form of acetate and formate, which could be provided by either an abiotic mechanism or a primitive pathway for carbon fixation (e.g., a primitive variant of the Wood-Ljungdahl pathway or the reductive TCA cycle.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

LEGO BLOCKS. “Network expansion was performed with a seed set of eight compounds thought to have been available in prebiotic environments, notably lacking phosphate.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

THE ALGORITHM. “The algorithm adds metabolites and reactions to an initial seed set, iteratively asking whether any new reaction could take place given the available substrates, until convergence to a final set of reactions and metabolites (or “scope”).” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

STARTING BLOCKS. “To this end we adopted the network expansion algorithm, which simulates the emergence of metabolic networks from a predefined set of compounds.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

SEARCH PARAMETERS. “We started by searching for regions of global metabolism that could be accessible starting from simple molecules likely to have been geochemically abundant on early Earth.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

MINERAL ROOTS. “One fundamental property we focused on is the reliance of these enzymes on iron-sulfur or metal coenzymes, reflecting the notion that modern biochemistry emerged from mineral geochemistry and that metal-based cofactors in modern day enzymes represent a living relic of this contingency.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

METABOLIC BUILDING BLOCKS. “Intermediates in the degradation and biosynthesis of more complex biomolecules are also observed; 5,6-dihydrouracil is an oxidized catabolic product of uracil and pyrrole is the basic building block for complex heterocyclic aromatic rings like heme” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn

KEY REACTIONS. “In this network, building upon a core carbon, energy and nitrogen metabolism, hydrogen sulfide enables the production of sulfur-containing heterogeneous peptides like glutathione, as well as thioester derivatives like S-formyl and S-succinyl glutathione.” https://lnkd.in/dcwZe7b View in LinkedIn