New Clues to Chemical Origins of Metabolism at Dawn of Life

[Seldom Bucket]

Popular speculations about how life evolved out of a soup of chemicals on the early Earth often focus on the origins of DNA and RNA, the molecules of genetic information. But the genesis of genes is only one of the mysteries that origin-of-life theories must reckon with. Another is the rise of metabolism — the biochemical processes inside cells that make life possible by continuously drawing energy from the environment and directing it into the assembly of vital molecules. It’s a complex problem on which there has been little headway.

New Clues to Chemical Origins of Metabolism at Dawn of Life

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

www.quantamagazine.org