Carbon-based “organic” molecules are the foundational blocks of all living beings on Earth. Elucidating the primordial sources of reduced carbon at the emergence of life is therefore key to understanding the processes that gave rise to biochemistry from geochemistry. There were multiple plausible sources of reduced carbon on the early Earth, and a rich array of corresponding theories for the...
Understanding how protometabolic pathways arose on the early Earth is primarily focussed on trying to replicate, abiotically, the reverse-TCA (rTCA) reaction pathway. However this approach runs into the same difficulties as the “RNA World” or “Protein World” hypothesis – in that it focusses only on the abiotic synthesis and transformations of the biotic components in the rTCA cycle, while...
