{"id":325828,"date":"2022-03-30T06:59:16","date_gmt":"2022-03-30T13:59:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/reasons.org\/?p=325828"},"modified":"2022-03-30T06:59:16","modified_gmt":"2022-03-30T13:59:16","slug":"evidence-that-the-cells-metabolism-is-planned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reasons.org\/creation\/life\/evidence-that-the-cells-metabolism-is-planned","title":{"rendered":"Evidence That the Cell\u2019s Metabolism Is Planned"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I have lived in the Los Angeles area for over two decades, but I am still a small-town boy at heart. Growing up in West Virginia, I lived in communities with population sizes well under 30,000. Even during my years in college, graduate school and as a post doctoral fellow, I lived in small towns. It was quite a culture shock for me when I moved my family to Cincinnati, Ohio, to take a position in R&D at a Fortune 500 company. It was by far the largest place I had ever lived. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The culture shock was even greater when we moved to the Los Angeles area in 1999. Nothing had prepared me for the immensity of Southern California and the intensity of the traffic. After I got over my initial reaction, I discovered that it was easier to get around Southern California than many of the other communities in which I had lived. In part, my ease was made possible because most of the suburban towns surrounding Los Angeles are laid out in a grid, with major streets oriented north and south and east and west. Moreover, these communities were specifically designed with the idea that automobiles would serve as their primary mode of transportation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of the cities in the East and Midwest are much older than LA and weren\u2019t designed with automobiles in mind. In fact, some of these older cities weren\u2019t really planned at all. In their earlier days, these cities grew and developed organically in an unplanned manner. It was only later that city leaders began planning the expansion of their communities and attempted to retrofit them for automobiles. The complex history of these cities can make them a challenge to navigate by car.

Intermediary Metabolism<\/strong>
Interconnected city streets share a lot in common with metabolic pathways located inside cells. The chemical reactions that comprise intermediary metabolism are organized like city streets into routes or pathways comprised of a series of chemical reactions. These reactions transform starting compounds into final products via a sequence of <\/s>small, stepwise chemical changes. Each step in a metabolic route is mediated by a protein (called an enzyme). The pathways can be linear, branched, or circular.

The chemical components that form part of one metabolic sequence sometimes take part in other pathways. These shared compounds cause metabolic pathways to be interconnected and networked together in the same way that streets form intersections when they come together. The collection of metabolic processes represents a complex, reticulated web of chemical reactions, each one catalyzed by an enzyme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Figure: The Chemical Routes of Intermediary Metabolism<\/strong>
Credit: Evans Love<\/a>, Wikipedia<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Origin of Intermediary Metabolism<\/strong>
One of the questions confronting origin-of-life researchers is, Are these metabolic routes in the cell planned or unplanned? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At first glance, it would be easy to conclude that there isn\u2019t necessarily any rhyme or reason for the design of intermediary metabolism. In fact, given the vast complexity of the cell\u2019s metabolism, it\u2019s not unreasonable to think that evolutionary processes simply cobbled together these pathways, bit by bit, over vast time periods through a historically contingent process\u2014just like the unplanned layout of some of the cities located in the East and the Midwest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet, a recent study by researchers from Heinrich Heine University (HHU) in D\u00fcsseldorf, Germany has uncovered a special property for 402 core metabolic reactions that are found in every organism on the planet.1<\/sup> This special property reveals that a rationale undergirds metabolic pathways, indicating that they are unlikely the outworking of a historically contingent evolutionary history. Instead, their design seems to be just-right, and predetermined and prescribed by the laws of nature in the same way the streets and highways of Southern California have been carefully planned. If so, this revelation points to a teleological undergirding to life\u2019s most basic and fundamental systems.

What Was the Original Energy Source for Intermediary Metabolism?<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n