{"id":281894,"date":"2017-03-02T13:00:02","date_gmt":"2017-03-02T17:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?guid=5cdd2177c4c5bea286d76df4f2177523"},"modified":"2017-03-02T13:00:02","modified_gmt":"2017-03-02T17:00:02","slug":"biochemical-fossil-shows-how-life-may-have-emerged-without-phosphate-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=281894","title":{"rendered":"Biochemical &#8216;fossil&#8217; shows how life may have emerged without phosphate"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One major mystery about life&#8217;s origin is how phosphate became an essential building block of genetic and metabolic machinery in cells, given its poor accessibility on early Earth. In a study published on March 9 in the journal Cell, researchers used systems biology approaches to tackle this long-standing conundrum, providing compelling, data-driven evidence that primitive life forms may not have relied on phosphate at all. Instead, a few simple, abundant molecules could have supported the emergence of a sulfur-based, phosphate-free metabolism, which expanded to form a rich network of biochemical reactions capable of supporting the synthesis of a broad category of key biomolecules.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One major mystery about life&#8217;s origin is how phosphate became an essential building block of genetic and metabolic machinery in cells, given its poor accessibility on early Earth. In a study published on March 9 in the journal Cell, researchers used sy&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":615444,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-281894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=281894"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":281895,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281894\/revisions\/281895"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/615444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=281894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=281894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=281894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}