Jinich, and 7 co-authors, reported in late 2020 that redox biochemistry plays a key role in the transduction of chemical energy in living systems. However, the compounds observed in metabolic redox reactions are a minuscule fraction of chemical space. It is not clear whether compounds that ended
up being selected as metabolites display specific properties that distinguish them from nonbiological compounds. The authors introduced a systematic approach for comparing the chemical space of all possible redox states of linear-chain carbon molecules to the corresponding metabolites that appear in biology.
Using cheminformatics and quantum chemistry, the authors analyzed the physicochemical and thermodynamic properties of the biological and nonbiological
compounds. They found that, among all compounds, aldose sugars have the highest possible number of redox connections to other molecules. Metabolites are enriched in carboxylic acid functional groups and depleted of ketones and aldehydes and have higher solubility than nonbiological compounds. Upon constructing the energy landscape for the full chemical space as a function of pH and electron-donor potential, the authors found that metabolites tend to
have lower Gibbs energies than nonbiological molecules.
Finally, the authors generated Pourbaix phase diagrams that serve as a thermodynamic atlas to indicate which compounds are energy minima in redox chemical space across a set of pH values and electron-donor potentials. While escape from thermodynamic equilibrium toward kinetically driven states is a hallmark of life and its origin, they envisioned that a deeper quantitative understanding of the environment-dependent thermodynamic landscape of putative prebiotic molecules will provide a crucial reference for future origins-of-life models.
Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-
