ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Reactivity landscape of pyruvate under simulated hydrothermal vent conditions.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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25 citing papers in PubMed, 73 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Thermodynamic Constraints on the Citric Acid Cycle and Related Reactions in Ocean World Interiors.ACS earth & space chemistry · 2025Article
- Prebiotic Interconversion of Pyruvate and Lactate over Zeolite-Supported Ni Catalyst.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2025Article
- Prebiotic formation of enantiomeric excess D-amino acids on natural pyrite.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Glycine synthesis from nitrate and glyoxylate mediated by ferroan brucite: An integrated pathway for prebiotic amine synthesis.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Alternative Pathways in Astrobiology: Reviewing and Synthesizing Contingency and Non-Biomolecular Origins of Terrestrial and Extraterrestrial Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Pyruvate-dependent growth ofJournal of bacteriology · 2024Article
- Aqueous microdroplets promote C-C bond formation and sequences in the reverse tricarboxylic acid cycle.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Hybrid organic-inorganic structures trigger the formation of primitive cell-like compartments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Ambient temperature CONature communications · 2023Article
- A plausible metal-free ancestral analogue of the Krebs cycle composed entirely of α-ketoacids.Nature chemistry · 2020Article
- Reactivity of Metabolic Intermediates and Cofactor Stability under Model Early Earth Conditions.Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life · 2020Article
- Unique Solid Phase Microextraction Sampler Reveals Distinctive Biogeochemical Profiles among Various Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vents.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- The evolution of metabolism: How to test evolutionary hypotheses at the genomic level.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2020Review
- Metals likely promoted protometabolism in early ocean alkaline hydrothermal systems.Science advances · 2019Article
- Article
- Redox and pH gradients drive amino acid synthesis in iron oxyhydroxide mineral systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Chemical Diversity of Metal Sulfide Minerals and Its Implications for the Origin of Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2018Review
- Linked cycles of oxidative decarboxylation of glyoxylate as protometabolic analogs of the citric acid cycle.Nature communications · 2018Article
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2 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Pyruvate is an important "hub" metabolite that is a precursor for amino acids, sugars, cofactors, and lipids in extant metabolic networks. Pyruvate has been produced under simulated hydrothermal vent conditions from alkyl thiols and carbon monoxide in the presence of transition metal sulfides at 250 °C [Cody GD et al. (2000) Science 289(5483):1337-1340], so it is plausible that pyruvate was formed in hydrothermal systems on the early earth. We report here that pyruvate reacts readily in the presence of transition metal sulfide minerals under simulated hydrothermal vent fluids at more moderate temperatures (25-110 °C) that are more conducive to survival of biogenic molecules. We found that pyruvate partitions among five reaction pathways at rates that depend upon the nature of the mineral present; the concentrations of H2S, H2, and NH4Cl; and the temperature. In most cases, high yields of one or two primary products are found due to preferential acceleration of certain pathways. Reactions observed include reduction of ketones to alcohols and aldol condensation, both reactions that are common in extant metabolic networks. We also observed reductive amination to form alanine and reduction to form propionic acid. Amino acids and fatty acids formed by analogous processes may have been important components of a protometabolic network that allowed the emergence of life.
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