ArticleNature ecology & evolution2024
Primitive purine biosynthesis connects ancient geochemistry to modern metabolism.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 4 citations in OpenAlex.
- The history of enzyme evolution embedded in metabolism.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Primitive Basic Amino Acids Promote Mineral-Catalyzed Electrochemical Reduction of HThe journal of physical chemistry. C, Nanomaterials and interfaces · 2026Article
- Potential metabolic viability on asteroid chemistry.Communications chemistry · 2026Article
- A scope of prebiotic neat reaction conditions and the mechanism of urea-assisted phosphorylations of alcohols.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Distribution of Polyphosphate Kinase 2 Genes in Bacteria Underscores a Dynamic Evolutionary History.Proteins · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
An unresolved question in the origin and evolution of life is whether a continuous path from geochemical precursors to the majority of molecules in the biosphere can be reconstructed from modern-day biochemistry. Here we identified a feasible path by simulating the evolution of biosphere-scale metabolism, using only known biochemical reactions and models of primitive coenzymes. We find that purine synthesis constitutes a bottleneck for metabolic expansion, which can be alleviated by non-autocatalytic phosphoryl coupling agents. Early phases of the expansion are enriched with enzymes that are metal dependent and structurally symmetric, supporting models of early biochemical evolution. This expansion trajectory suggests distinct hypotheses regarding the tempo, mode and timing of metabolic pathway evolution, including a late appearance of methane metabolisms and oxygenic photosynthesis consistent with the geochemical record. The concordance between biological and geological analyses suggests that this trajectory provides a plausible evolutionary history for the vast majority of core biochemistry.
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Registered trials
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