Overview
- An international team published a peer‑reviewed analysis in Science Advances that mapped about 420 core metabolic reactions and used a new ordering algorithm to infer how those reactions arose.
- The authors report that the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) had enzymes for roughly half of those reactions while environmental metals catalyzed the rest, indicating a metal–enzyme hybrid stage before modern enzyme control.
- Comparisons of genomes and protein structures show many shared metabolic reactions are catalyzed by different, nonhomologous enzymes in bacteria and archaea, which the team interprets as two independent moves to free‑living cells.
- Laboratory chemistry from the same group found that phosphite reacting with palladium can drive phosphorylation‑type reactions in water, offering a plausible pre‑ATP energy chemistry for early metabolism.
- The claims rest on a novel computational method, structural inferences and preliminary lab work, so the study calls for independent replication, broader genome sampling and further chemical tests before the findings are settled.