Protometabolic Reduction of NAD<sup>+</sup> with α-Keto Acids
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Deciphering the origins of the chemistry that supports life has frequently centered on determining prebiotically plausible paths that produce the molecules found in biology. What has been less investigated is how the energy released from the breakdown of foodstuff is coupled to the persistence of the protocell. To gain better insight into how such coupled chemistry could have emerged prebiotically, we probed the reactivity of the ribodinucleotide NAD+ with small organic molecules that were previously identified as potential constituents of protometabolism. We find that NAD+ is readily reduced nonenzymatically by α-keto acids, such as pyruvate and oxaloacetate, during oxidative decarboxylation. In the presence of FAD and a terminal electron acceptor, the consumption of α-keto acids by NAD+ initiates a plausible prebiotic electron transport chain. The observed reactivity suggests that components of the RNA world were capable of initiating the chemistry needed to capture the energy released from catabolism to drive anabolism.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it