Rumraket
February 14, 2023, 4:16pm
26
One has to wonder what progress has to look like if all the actual progress that has happened in the field doesn’t count to you. I mean if this isn’t progress then your standards are blatantly irrational:
Nick Lane’s research group as UCL has found an answer to one of the most fundamental mysteries about the chemistry of life: Why do cells use ATP rather than any one of the other, equally capable nucleotide triphosphates? It turns out the answer is found uniquely in abiotic chemistry.
The ion Fe3+ will catalyze the phosphorylation of only ADP to ATP with acetyl-phosphate(AcP) under mild and anoxic conditions in water, whereas the reaction does not occur for any of the other nucleotides, and no other common ion or metabolic cofactor seems able to catalyze the reaction.
Thus prebiotic chemistry that would have almost certainly existed on the primordial Earth(high iron contents in water, no oxygen) answers this most fundamental question about the basic metabolic process of all known cellular life. This then, incidentally, also constitutes evidence that the metabolic processes of life on Earth began with prebiotic chemistry in an aqueous setting. And is thus evidence for a natural, phys…
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