The Creb Cycle Is What's Powering Us

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The creb cycle was discovered in the 19 thirties by hans krebs. It became dusty text book by chemistry a. People have to learn it, and don't want to know and forget it as soon as they can. But in the sixties there was a really funky discovery that some bacteria living in deep sea hydrothermal vents do the creb cycle backwards. So this is the reverse creb cyce, and it's basically turning gases into the molecules of life. We start with hydrogen and c o two. And what do we get? We get these creb cycle intermediates. Almost all of them forming under a fairly simple set of conditions.

The origin of life here on Earth was an important and fascinating event, but it was also a long time ago and hasn’t left many pieces of direct evidence concerning what actually happened. One set of clues we have comes from processes in current living organisms, especially those processes that seem extremely common. The Krebs cycle, the sequence of reactions that functions as a pathway for energy distribution in aerobic organisms, is such an example. I talk with biochemist about the importance of the Krebs cycle to contemporary biology, as well as its possible significance in understanding the origin of life.

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Nick Lane received his PhD from the Royal Free Hospital Medical School. He is currently a professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry at University College London. He was a founding member of the UCL Consortium for Mitochondrial Research, and is Co-Director of the UCL Centre for Life’s Origin and Evolution. He was awarded the 2009 UCL Provost’s Venture Research Prize, the 2011 BMC Research Award for Genetics, Genomics, Bioinformatics and Evolution, the 2015 Biochemical Society Award, and the 2016 Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture. His new book is Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death.

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