Nonenzymatic Carboxylate Phosphorylation in Water
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The core pathways of autotrophic microbial metabolism have been proposed to be fossils of self‐organized prebiotic chemistry. In recent years, numerous reactions within these pathways have been shown to occur nonenzymatically, supporting this hypothesis. However, the phosphorylation of carboxylic acids to the corresponding acyl phosphates, a recurring metabolic reaction, has notably yet to be demonstrated without enzymes. Here, this study shows that carboxylate phosphorylation is promoted by diamidophosphate and sodium nitrite in the presence of water, driven by the release of dinitrogen. The reaction occurs in minutes at 0–50 °C to convert carboxylic acids to acyl amidophosphate intermediates, which then undergo nitrite‐promoted hydrolysis to give the corresponding acyl phosphates. The partial overlap in scope with important metabolic carboxylates and the concentrated acidic conditions likely limit its direct applicability in metabolic origins of life scenarios. Nonetheless, the work represents a step forward in understanding nonenzymatic carboxylate phosphorylation and helps clarify how the transformation might eventually be rendered compatible with a protometabolism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".