Prebiotic Systems Chemistry: Complexity Overcoming Clutter

Living organisms are the most complex chemical system known to exist, yet they exploit only a small constellation of universally conserved metabolites to support indefinite evolution. The chemical unity that belies biodiversity strongly indicates a unified origin of life predicated by a simple set of predisposed chemical reactions. If prebiotic chemistry is prone to produce highly complex mixtures that do not reflect life's underlying unity, this then implies that the feasibility of elucidating life's origins might be an insurmountable task. However, recently, prebiotic systems chemistry has emerged to exploit the chemical links between different metabolites, providing unprecedented scope for exploration of the origins of life and an exciting new perspective on a four-billion-year-old problem. At the heart of this systems approach is an understanding that individual classes of metabolites cannot be considered in isolation, and this review highlights some recent advances that suggest that canonical metabolites are predisposed chemical structures.