Synthetic connectivity, emergence, and self-regeneration in the network of prebiotic chemistry

Abstract

Mapping primordial reaction networks Chemists seeking to understand the origins of life have published a wide range of reactions that may have yielded the building blocks of proteins, nucleic acids, and lipids from simple precursors. Wołos et al. scoured the literature to document each such reaction class and then wrote software that applied the reactions first to the simplest compounds such as cyanide, water, and ammonia, and then iteratively to each successive generation of products. The resulting network predicted a variety of previously unappreciated routes to biochemically relevant compounds, several of which the authors validated experimentally. Science , this issue p. eaaw1955