Shiny metal catalysts at the origin of metabolism.

Native reduced metals deposited in serpentinizing hydrothermal vents catalyze CO2 fixation and phosphorylation, replacing multiple enzyme pathways and revealing a new energy source for metabolism’s origin.

• Why it matters: The work addresses how conserved ~400-reaction metabolic networks could arise before enzymes, using Earth’s crust chemistry as a clue to prebiotic catalysts.
• What they did: In laboratory experiments, native metal catalysts fix CO2 and phosphorylate organic compounds in water using phosphite, substituting for hydrogenases, acetyl-CoA to pyruvate, Krebs cycle, amino acid syntheses, NADH, and ferredoxin.
• The result: These findings imply that reduced native metals could have supported key metabolic transformations and energy generation at the origin of metabolism.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.