If I had a hunch it would route through the idea of metal atoms that fit into larger enzymes like rock knives wielded by squishy caveman hands.
As wikipedia says of inorganic biochemical co-factors:
In nutrition, the list of essential trace elements reflects their role as cofactors. In humans this list commonly includes iron, magnesium, manganese, cobalt, copper, zinc, and molybdenum.
So the thing I would naively do, to find candidate minerals, would be to try to sift conserved co-factors, especially with a focus on ribozymes that do the same trick, and then these “metalloribozymes” (some of which do exist in evolved systems still) might suggest typical mineral environments where things first started and never stopped being essential…
...but I don’t seem much mention of Olivine playing well with copper or zinc, and [manganese olivine] goes to its own name: Tephroite. But there was no mention of Tephroite in the review.
So this is where my own naive priors would send me looking: for minerals full of elemental cofactors common to ancient metalloribozymes. Lots of data sifting seems likely to be useful, over ribozyme and enzyme databases, and mineral databases, which I have not done.
Did Nick Lane do this kind of data sifting to find the name “Olivine”, or did he use some other method?
One idea is that he got the name from the literature, and perhaps cites whoever proposed Olivine? When I search [olivine biogenesis] I get Serpentinization results which echo the link you offered (and youtube on [serpentization] gives a fun experimental video that is interesting but sheds no particular light for me).
Synthesizing this… maybe the practical upshot is just “most normal mantle material reacting with seawater” could be loosely called “something-like-olivine turning to something-like-serpentine” and since there is so much mantle, and so much seawater, priors say that “this general reaction” is the key reaction at a high and fuzzy level of description. Maybe?
It looks like he got it from Mike Russell, though he disagrees with Russell on the details.
Regarding cofactors, the important thing (in Lane’s version of this model) about serpentinization is that it is alkaline. This would cause iron to precipitate out (as iron hydroxides and iron sulphates), and dissolve minerals such as nickel and molybdenum.
He points out nickel-doped greigite (Fe5NiS8) as a mineral with a crystal structure similar to several ancient metalloribozymes, and which he thinks was likely to have deposited on the walls of pores in the rock (serpentine?).
Thanks! Does he explain “why Olivine”?
If I had a hunch it would route through the idea of metal atoms that fit into larger enzymes like rock knives wielded by squishy caveman hands.
As wikipedia says of inorganic biochemical co-factors:
So the thing I would naively do, to find candidate minerals, would be to try to sift conserved co-factors, especially with a focus on ribozymes that do the same trick, and then these “metalloribozymes” (some of which do exist in evolved systems still) might suggest typical mineral environments where things first started and never stopped being essential…
...but I don’t seem much mention of Olivine playing well with copper or zinc, and [manganese olivine] goes to its own name: Tephroite. But there was no mention of Tephroite in the review.
So this is where my own naive priors would send me looking: for minerals full of elemental cofactors common to ancient metalloribozymes. Lots of data sifting seems likely to be useful, over ribozyme and enzyme databases, and mineral databases, which I have not done.
Did Nick Lane do this kind of data sifting to find the name “Olivine”, or did he use some other method?
One idea is that he got the name from the literature, and perhaps cites whoever proposed Olivine? When I search [olivine biogenesis] I get Serpentinization results which echo the link you offered (and youtube on [serpentization] gives a fun experimental video that is interesting but sheds no particular light for me).
Synthesizing this… maybe the practical upshot is just “most normal mantle material reacting with seawater” could be loosely called “something-like-olivine turning to something-like-serpentine” and since there is so much mantle, and so much seawater, priors say that “this general reaction” is the key reaction at a high and fuzzy level of description. Maybe?
It looks like he got it from Mike Russell, though he disagrees with Russell on the details.
Regarding cofactors, the important thing (in Lane’s version of this model) about serpentinization is that it is alkaline. This would cause iron to precipitate out (as iron hydroxides and iron sulphates), and dissolve minerals such as nickel and molybdenum.
He points out nickel-doped greigite (Fe5NiS8) as a mineral with a crystal structure similar to several ancient metalloribozymes, and which he thinks was likely to have deposited on the walls of pores in the rock (serpentine?).