ArticleNature ecology & evolution2019
Environmental boundary conditions for the origin of life converge to an organo-sulfur metabolism.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed.
- The history of enzyme evolution embedded in metabolism.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Low-Molecular-Weight Polyols as Key Factors in Sulfur- and Borate-Mediated Protomembrane Formation Before the RNA World.Membranes · 2026Review
- Entropy-Driven Amino Acid-Based Coacervates with Enzyme-Free Metabolism and Prebiotic Robustness.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2025Article
- Sugars to Acids via Thioesters: A Computational Study.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Simulated early Earth geochemistry fuels a hydrogen-dependent primordial metabolism.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Neuroprotective signaling by hydrogen sulfide and its dysregulation in Alzheimer's disease.Current opinion in chemical biology · 2024Review
- Prebiotic thiol-catalyzed thioamide bond formation.Geochemical transactions · 2024Article
- Quantitative principles of microbial metabolism shared across scales.Nature microbiology · 2024Review
- Article
- Primitive purine biosynthesis connects ancient geochemistry to modern metabolism.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Prebiotic Synthesis of ATP: A Terrestrial Volcanism-Dependent Pathway.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- On the potential roles of phosphorus in the early evolution of energy metabolism.Frontiers in microbiology · 2023Review
- Hydrogen Drives Part of the Reverse Krebs Cycle under Metal or Meteorite Catalysis.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2022Article
- An evolutionary history of the CoA-binding protein Nat/Ivy.Protein science : a publication of the Protein Society · 2022Review
- Protein cost minimization promotes the emergence of coenzyme redundancy.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Scaling laws in enzyme function reveal a new kind of biochemical universality.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Computational Analysis of a Prebiotic Amino Acid Synthesis with Reference to Extant Codon-Amino Acid Relationships.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Plausibility of Early Life in a Relatively Wide Temperature Range: Clues from Simulated Metabolic Network Expansion.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Origin of Life on Mars: Suitability and Opportunities.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- The Grayness of the Origin of Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
It has been suggested that a deep memory of early life is hidden in the architecture of metabolic networks, whose reactions could have been catalyzed by small molecules or minerals before genetically encoded enzymes. A major challenge in unravelling these early steps is assessing the plausibility of a connected, thermodynamically consistent proto-metabolism under different geochemical conditions, which are still surrounded by high uncertainty. Here we combine network-based algorithms with physico-chemical constraints on chemical reaction networks to systematically show how different combinations of parameters (temperature, pH, redox potential and availability of molecular precursors) could have affected the evolution of a proto-metabolism. Our analysis of possible trajectories indicates that a subset of boundary conditions converges to an organo-sulfur-based proto-metabolic network fuelled by a thioester- and redox-driven variant of the reductive tricarboxylic acid cycle that is capable of producing lipids and keto acids. Surprisingly, environmental sources of fixed nitrogen and low-potential electron donors are not necessary for the earliest phases of biochemical evolution. We use one of these networks to build a steady-state dynamical metabolic model of a protocell, and find that different combinations of carbon sources and electron donors can support the continuous production of a minimal ancient 'biomass' composed of putative early biopolymers and fatty acids.
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