Deep-sea hydrothermal vents provide a chemical interface between Earth’s reducing core and its oxidizing oceans. Today these environments support diverse chemosynthetic ecosystems (1), and after being discovered, they were soon proposed as the original site for the emergence of life (2). These hypotheses have considerable appeal but have not been universally accepted, partly because many aspects of the proposed scenarios remain experimentally unconstrained. In particular, much remains unknown about what forms of prebiotic organic chemistry could have been possible at vents, and whether they could have produced abundant biological precursors. Addressing these questions is thus a critical challenge for research on the origin of life. In PNAS, Novikov and Copley (3) take a major next step in addressing this challenge, developing a unique experimental instrument to systematically explore simulated hydrothermal vent chemistry. The authors focus on the chemistry of pyruvate, which has both a central role inmodernmetabolism and was plausibly formed prebiotically at hydrothermal vents (4).
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