ArticleNature communications2021
Identifying molecules as biosignatures with assembly theory and mass spectrometry.
Article in Nature communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 63 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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
63 citing papers in PubMed, 163 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- From searching for extraterrestrial biosignatures to exploring the origins of life: A prebiotic chemistry perspective.Fundamental research · 2026Review
- Molecular assembly as a universal biosignature measurable by mass spectrometry.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Proto-Biosignatures and Planetary Geochemical Metabolism: A Thermodynamic Screening Model of Prebiotic Geochemical Organization.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Mapping Evolution of Molecules across Biochemistry with Assembly Theory.Journal of chemical information and modeling · 2026Article
- Agnostic material classification using differential de Bruijn graphs of DNA imprints.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- CBR-db: A Cheminformatic Database for Biochemical Reaction Analysis.ACS synthetic biology · 2026Article
- The RNA-First Fallacy: Conflating Evolutionary Ancestry with Prebiotic Primacy.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Chemputer and chemputation-A universal chemical compound synthesis machine.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Context, Consequence, Coincidence, and Cumulative Cultural Evolution: Linking Creativity and Culturo-Behavioral Phenomena Together Using Systems Principles and Processes of Selection by Consequences.Perspectives on behavior science · 2026Review
- Review
- Rapid Exploration of the Assembly Chemical Space of Molecular Graphs.Journal of chemical information and modeling · 2025Article
- Organic geochemical evidence for life in Archean rocks identified by pyrolysis-GC-MS and supervised machine learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Bifurcations and phase transitions in the origins of life.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Origins of life: the possible and the actual.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- A View on Molecular Complexity from the GDB Chemical Space.Journal of chemical information and modeling · 2025Review
- Evolutionary features in a minimal physical system: Diversity, selection, growth, inheritance, and adaptation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Diet to Data: Validation of a Bias-Mitigating Nutritional Screener Using Assembly Theory.Nutrients · 2025Article
- Thermodynamic Constraints on the Citric Acid Cycle and Related Reactions in Ocean World Interiors.ACS earth & space chemistry · 2025Article
- An Informational-Entropic Approach to Exoplanet Characterization.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
3 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
11 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The search for alien life is hard because we do not know what signatures are unique to life. We show why complex molecules found in high abundance are universal biosignatures and demonstrate the first intrinsic experimentally tractable measure of molecular complexity, called the molecular assembly index (MA). To do this we calculate the complexity of several million molecules and validate that their complexity can be experimentally determined by mass spectrometry. This approach allows us to identify molecular biosignatures from a set of diverse samples from around the world, outer space, and the laboratory, demonstrating it is possible to build a life detection experiment based on MA that could be deployed to extraterrestrial locations, and used as a complexity scale to quantify constraints needed to direct prebiotically plausible processes in the laboratory. Such an approach is vital for finding life elsewhere in the universe or creating de-novo life in the lab.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.