ArticleLife (Basel, Switzerland)2015
Prediction of the maximum temperature for life based on the stability of metabolites to decomposition in water.
Article in Life (Basel, Switzerland), 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Emergence of an Urable Earth: How Early Planetary Evolution Shaped the Chemical Window for Life's Origin.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- The Maximum Growth Temperature for Eukaryotes Is Thermodynamically Driven but Ecologically Contingent.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Exploring the phylogeny, molecular and genomic adaptations of thermophilic microalgae and cyanobacteria.Planta · 2026Review
- Evolutionary-scale enzymology enables exploration of a rugged catalytic landscape.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Prebiotic Peptide Synthesis: How Did Longest Peptide Appear?Journal of molecular evolution · 2025Review
- Device Processing Challenges for Miniaturized Sensing Systems Targeting Biological Fluids.Biomedical materials & devices (New York, N.Y.) · 2022Review
- Deciphering Symbiotic Interactions of "mSystems · 2021Article
- Plausibility of Early Life in a Relatively Wide Temperature Range: Clues from Simulated Metabolic Network Expansion.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Exoplanet Biosignatures: A Framework for Their Assessment.Astrobiology · 2018Review
- The deep, hot biosphere: Twenty-five years of retrospection.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The components of life must survive in a cell long enough to perform their function in that cell. Because the rate of attack by water increases with temperature, we can, in principle, predict a maximum temperature above which an active terrestrial metabolism cannot function by analysis of the decomposition rates of the components of life, and comparison of those rates with the metabolites' minimum metabolic half-lives. The present study is a first step in this direction, providing an analytical framework and method, and analyzing the stability of 63 small molecule metabolites based on literature data. Assuming that attack by water follows a first order rate equation, we extracted decomposition rate constants from literature data and estimated their statistical reliability. The resulting rate equations were then used to give a measure of confidence in the half-life of the metabolite concerned at different temperatures. There is little reliable data on metabolite decomposition or hydrolysis rates in the literature, the data is mostly confined to a small number of classes of chemicals, and the data available are sometimes mutually contradictory because of varying reaction conditions. However, a preliminary analysis suggests that terrestrial biochemistry is limited to environments below ~150-180 °C. We comment briefly on why pressure is likely to have a small effect on this.
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Registered trials
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