Network-level fossil of a phosphate-free biosphere

The emergence of a metabolism capable of sustaining cellular life on early Earth is a major unresolved enigma. Such a transition from prebiotic chemistry to an organized biochemical network seemingly required the concurrent availability of multiple molecular components. One of these components, phosphate, carries several essential functions in present-day metabolism, most notably energy transduction through ATP. However, the ubiquity of phosphate in living systems today stands in sharp contrast with its poor geochemical availability, prompting previous efforts to search for plausible prebiotic sources. The alternative, intriguing possibility is that primitive life did not require phosphate. Here we explore this possibility by determining the feasibility and functional potential of a phosphate-independent metabolism amongst the set of all known biochemical reactions in the biosphere. Surprisingly, we identified a cryptic phosphate-independent core metabolism that can be generated from simple sets of compounds thought to be available on early Earth. This network can support the biosynthesis of a broad category of key biomolecules. The enzymes contained in this network display a striking enrichment for dependence on iron-sulfur and transition metal coenzymes, a fundamental cornerstone of early biochemistry. We furthermore show that phosphate-independent precursors of present-day cofactors could have helped overcome thermodynamic energy barriers, enabling the production of a rich set of biomolecules, including 15 out of the 20 amino acids, vitamins, pentoses and nucleobases. Altogether, our results suggest that present-day biochemical networks may contain vestiges of a very ancient past, and that a complex thioester-based metabolism could have predated the incorporation of phosphate and an RNA-based genetic system.