ArticleJournal of molecular evolution2021
Water and Life: The Medium is the Message.
Article in Journal of molecular evolution, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 70 citations in OpenAlex.
- The master molecule that built biology: How water shaped the chemistry of life.Protein science : a publication of the Protein Society · 2026Review
- Is Digital Drying an Effective Method for Infrared Spectroscopy of Gaseous Biofluid?Analytical chemistry · 2025Article
- Serine Octamer Clusters Direct the Chirality of Peptides Formed in Water Microdroplets.The journal of physical chemistry. A · 2025Article
- The structure and dynamics of water molecule networks underlie catalytic efficiency in a glycoside exo-hydrolase.Communications biology · 2025Article
- The Emerging Role of Water Loss in Dog Aging.Cells · 2025Review
- Article
- Crowding in Anhydrobiosis.Sub-cellular biochemistry · 2025Review
- Rapid hydrolysis rates of thio- and phosphate esters constrain the origin of metabolism to cool, acidic to neutral environments.iScience · 2024Article
- From Catalysis of Evolution to Evolution of Catalysis.Accounts of chemical research · 2024Article
- Qualitative Monitoring of Proto-Peptide Condensation by Differential FTIR Spectroscopy.ACS earth & space chemistry · 2024Article
- The biophysics of water in cell biology: perspectives on a keystone for both marine sciences and cancer research.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2024Article
- A zeolitic imidazolate framework (ZIF-67) and graphitic carbon nitride (g-CRSC advances · 2023Article
- The elements of life: A biocentric tour of the periodic table.Advances in microbial physiology · 2023Article
- The Effects of Iron on In Silico Simulated Abiotic Reaction Networks.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Article
- An open source computational workflow for the discovery of autocatalytic networks in abiotic reactions.Chemical science · 2022Article
- A Thermodynamic Model for Water Activity and Redox Potential in Evolution and Development.Journal of molecular evolution · 2022Article
- Differential Oligomerization of Alpha versus Beta Amino Acids and Hydroxy Acids in Abiotic Proto-Peptide Synthesis Reactions.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Was There Land on the Early Earth?Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- 'Whole Organism', Systems Biology, and Top-Down Criteria for Evaluating Scenarios for the Origin of Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Water, the most abundant compound on the surface of the Earth and probably in the universe, is the medium of biology, but is much more than that. Water is the most frequent actor in the chemistry of metabolism. Our quantitation here reveals that water accounts for 99.4% of metabolites in Escherichia coli by molar concentration. Between a third and a half of known biochemical reactions involve consumption or production of water. We calculated the chemical flux of water and observed that in the life of a cell, a given water molecule frequently and repeatedly serves as a reaction substrate, intermediate, cofactor, and product. Our results show that as an E. coli cell replicates in the presence of molecular oxygen, an average in vivo water molecule is chemically transformed or is mechanistically involved in catalysis ~ 3.7 times. We conclude that, for biological water, there is no distinction between medium and chemical participant. Chemical transformations of water provide a basis for understanding not only extant biochemistry, but the origins of life. Because the chemistry of water dominates metabolism and also drives biological synthesis and degradation, it seems likely that metabolism co-evolved with biopolymers, which helps to reconcile polymer-first versus metabolism-first theories for the origins of life.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.