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from the start-your-life-with-a-glass-of-fruit-juice dept.
Chemists have found a series of chemical reactions that could have led to the first life on Earth:
Chemists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have developed a fascinating new theory for how life on Earth may have begun. Their experiments, described today in the journal Nature Communications, demonstrate that key chemical reactions that support life today could have been carried out with ingredients likely present on the planet four billion years ago.
[...] For the new study, Krishnamurthy and his coauthors, who are all members of the National Science Foundation/National Aeronautics and Space Administration Center for Chemical Evolution, focused on a series of chemical reactions that make up what researchers refer to as the citric acid cycle.
[...] Leaders of the new study started with the chemical reactions first. They wrote the recipe and then determined which molecules present on early Earth could have worked as ingredients. The new study outlines how two non-biological cycles—called the HKG cycle and the malonate cycle—could have come together to kick-start a crude version of the citric acid cycle. The two cycles use reactions that perform the same fundamental chemistry of a-ketoacids and b-ketoacids as in the citric acid cycle. These shared reactions include aldol additions, which bring new source molecules into the cycles, as well as beta and oxidative decarboxylations, which release the molecules as carbon dioxide (CO2).
As they ran these reactions, the researchers found they could produce amino acids in addition to CO2, which are also the end products of the citric acid cycle. The researchers think that as biological molecules like enzymes became available, they could have led to the replacement of non-biological molecules in these fundamental reactions to make them more elaborate and efficient.
Linked cycles of oxidative decarboxylation of glyoxylate as protometabolic analogs of the citric acid cycle (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-02591-0) (DX)
Previously: Diamidophosphate (DAP): "Missing Link" for Abiogenesis? (also by The Scripps Research Institute)
Related: Did Life on Earth Start Due to Meteorites Splashing Into Warm Little Ponds?
Life's First Molecule Was Protein, Not RNA, New Model Suggests
Analysis of Microfossils Finds that Microbial Life Existed at Least 3.5 Billion Years Ago
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09 2018, @09:09PM
I think what they meant was that these would have existed in the absence of life.