Question

1. Why is it likely that thioester and FeS compounds preceded phosphate compounds as an energy currency?

2. How did Paul Ehrlich’s work with the early aniline dyes lead him to believe that there could be “magic bullet” drugs?

3. What can the pharmaceutical industry and the health care industry do to reduce the emergence of more antibiotic resistance?

Answer 1

1. Thioester and FeS compounds are thought to be preceded phosphate compounds as an energy cuerrency for the following reasons:-

• For long, thioesters are considered as central to metabolism. The thioester bond is long and easily cleaved, making them highly reactive.
• Thioester bonds have a high free energy of hydrolysis (–43 kJ/mol), even higher than that of ATP (–31 kJ/mol), which is often generated from thioesters in metabolism.
• Thioesters can be synthesized in the laboratory from carbon monoxide (CO) and methyl sulfide in the presence of FeS, compounds that were likely present on the primordial Earth .
• FeS compounds are traditionally viewed as primitive catalysts in metabolism as they are completely inorganic and because metal sulfides would have been common on the early Earth. Reduced FeS clusters are also a currency of chemical energy similar to thioesters and ATP.
• FeS are also highly enriched in genomic reconstructions of the metabolism of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA), which used the acetyl-CoA pathway and lived off gases, harnessing energy by reducing CO2 with H2.