Life on Earth is a paradox—to function, all organisms need energy. But to harness that energy, living creatures rely on enzymes that have evolved over billions of years to make possible everything from respiration to photosynthesis to DNA repair. So what came first, the enzyme or the organism? A new study suggests that the iron-and-sulfur clusters at the heart of many life-critical enzymes could have been floating around Earth’s primordial seas some 4 billion years ago, produced by nothing more than primitive biomolecules, iron salts, and a previously unknown ingredient—ultraviolet (UV) light.
“It’s intriguing,” says Robert Hazen, a geophysicist who studies interactions between the mineral and living worlds at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, D.C. “[The development of iron-sulfide clusters] was likely an important step in life’s origins.”
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