Metabolic fossils from the origin of life
These networks are simpler and less complete than modern metabolism, but they can grow, they generate the building blocks of protein and RNA, and they trace to the common ancestor of all life.
An international team of researchers in Germany, New Zealand and the U.S.A. has investigated metabolic networks of primitive microbes and identified autocatalytic sets (interconnected collections of self-reinforcing reactions) that are older than genes.
