Tech
How blockchain technology could help reveal the origins of life
A team of chemists has managed to harness blockchain technology – typically used to mine cryptocurrencies – and create a huge computer network capable of investigating the emergence of life on Earth.
On the one hand, this shows how blockchain it can be used to solve problems that go beyond those of the financial sector; on the other, this particular study may have uncovered some leads for scientists searching for our own origins.
The crew’s mechanism revealed that some primitive forms of metabolism — chemical reactions that occur in the cells of living things and turn food into energy — may have emerged without the involvement of enzymes or proteins that help speed up such reactions.
And why did the team use blockchain technology to reach these conclusions?
Well, in general, the study of pre-life or “prebiotic” chemistry requires the observation of over 11 billion possible reactions between molecules. There are so many permutations to deal with. As you can imagine, completely completing such a task would require a huge amount of computing power. However, the team behind the new discovery, led by Bartosz Grzybowsk of the Korea Institute for Basic Science and the Polish Academy of Sciences, did not have a supercomputer to conduct this type of large-scale investigation. So instead, they turned to what’s known as “Golems.”
Golem is a cryptocurrency mining platform that orchestrates various calculations on hundreds of computers around the world, then trades cryptocurrency with processing time.
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“It allows you to get computing power in exchange for this cryptocurrency. So, I could rent your computer’s idle time,” Grzybowski told Space.com, noting that he and the team have no investments in Golem. “We were looking for a way to boost our processing capacity, and this is a worldwide computing scheme where thousands of people partnered with us and gave us the use of about 20,000 CPUs around the world.”
First, the team created the Network of Early Life (NOEL) of early molecules, or molecules that were likely present in the early stages of life. Earth about 4 billion years ago, including water, methane and ammonia. Then, the researchers took the 11 billion possible prebiotic reactions indicated and narrowed the figure down to a more manageable 4.9 billion reactions.
Grzybowski explained that even after this reduction, however, NOEL still represents a network about 100,000 times larger than that used in the team’s previous origins of life research, published in 2020.
Among the reactions possible in NOEL, some are part of chemical reactions called “metabolic pathways”. For example, glycolysis is a metabolic pathway during which glucose is broken down to produce energy. Other reactions, by comparison, closely mimic the Krebs cycle, which living things use to generate energy; still others are capable of synthesizing biotic molecules such as sugars and amino acids.
Using NOEL, the team discovered (to their surprise) that, of the billions of reactions generated, only a few hundred saw molecules create copies of themselves.
“It’s very, very rare. I was actually surprised at how rare it was, something like one reaction or one cycle in 1 million cycles could self-replicate,” Grzybowski explained.
This is remarkable because this process of self-replication, or “self-amplification,” has long been considered a crucial player in the emergence of life.
“For many decades, some chemists said, even in the early stages of this chemical evolution, molecules may have had a propensity to form cycles that would emit additional copies of the same material,” Grzybowski said. “Some molecules would replicate faster than others and create possible channels to take evolution in a certain direction.”
He added that another camp of origin-of-life chemists holds that early prebiotic molecules were too simple to replicate as complex modern biological molecules, such as DNA, do. Grzybowski believes this investigation could resolve the debate because it indicates, to his surprise, that self-replication did not occur before the evolution of much larger molecules.
“Even if we don’t see it with the origins of life, I still don’t give up on this idea of self-replication,” Grzybowski continued. “It must have appeared at some point because we know that biology now self-replicates, but the question is: at what stage of their complexity did the molecules start to replicate?”
As for using the Golem to create huge, powerful computer networks?
Grzybowski believes this could be widely used by researchers without access to a supercomputer, who need to perform a large amount of calculations.
“There are many other scientists who don’t have the privilege of having their own supercomputer. They can connect to a platform like Golem that is distributed around the world and have these kinds of resources at their disposal,” he concluded. “Perhaps society might be happier to use cryptocurrencies if people could be told that, in the process, we might discover new laws of biology or some new cancer drug.”
The team’s research was published Jan. 24 in the journal Chemistry.