A few years back, Stefany Moreno (MIT), Alan Pacheco (ETH Zurich) and myself met to discuss the origins of ancient metabolisms. Then, we decided to continue working on the project, and have just completed a week of our working group!
Before the evolution of a genetic system, a metabolic system needs to be in place, given that the genetic material is also metabolized
To accomplish a metabolic function, enzymes would need to be encoded in a proto-genome, else the environment would need to provide what's needed for a reaction to occurr
Thus, we modeled the trade-off between relying completely in the enviornment, which is cheap but unreliable, versus encoding every single function in the genome, which is an expensive strategy, but a reliable one
We are still working in the model, but so far things look cool.
We also got to see some of the yellow-ish leaves on the mountains near Hyde Park, which is quite a sight.
Green-to-yellow transition near Hyde Park, as the fall settles in Santa Fe
