Scientists Identify “Pioneer Peptide” That May Have Sparked Life on Earth

From the research article:

> Catalytic H2 production by NB-2Ni was demonstrated using a photochemical assay with an organic dye (EosinY) as a photosensitizer and triethanolamine (TEOA) as a sacrificial electron donor irradiated at 540 nm (15).

IIUC the main reaction is

2 H+ + TEOA + light --> H2 + ???

so they store the energy of the light in the H2, and assume that the cell already know how to use the H2.

The TEOA is slightly oxidized to ???. It has a few alcohol groups that are good candidates to be transformed.

The reaction also uses a dye, that is probably responsible to capture the light initially, and then transfer the energy to the enzyme.

It's also interesting because it's very small, only 13 amino acids. Many modern proteins have hundreds of amino acids that makes a brute force search approach to find them very difficult, but with 13 the search space is only ~ 20^13.