About the project
Working together, the decentralized power of the Golem Network and the visionary scientists from Allchemy embarked on a revolutionary project. Their research question would explore one of nature’s most important and fundamental mysteries— how did life on Earth begin?
2020
3,7 bn
molecules
powered by the Golem Network
- DePIN platform
How did life on Earth begin?
The answer to this thought-provoking question remains hidden. Billions of years ago, when there was no oxygen on our planet, only simple molecules reacted with each other, gradually becoming more complex. Ultimately, these molecules gave rise to the building blocks of all living matter. This evolutionary process marked the emergence of early chemical systems.
Creating a tree of life
In 2020, a group of scientists at chemoinformatics company ALLCHEMY created an algorithm that generated the tree of life: a graph comprising c. 50,000 molecules that may have emerged on prebiotic Earth. The results have already been published in Science Magazine, yet the team’s ambition has brought this work further.
Go to Science Magazine ↗
Computing power was a key ingredient
To simulate the emergence of early metabolic systems, the Allchemy team required enormous computing power. This was provided by the decentralized Golem Network, which gave the scientists access to immense computational power shared by people from all over the world.
Powered by the Golem Network
We explored:
billions of prebiotic reactions.
thousands of life-building molecules and simple peptides
millions of cycles including those mimicking primitive metabolism
Towards a scientific breakthrough
The result? The algorithm calculated 3.7 billion molecules, with nearly 5 billion reactions connecting them. This is the largest known network of prebiotic reactions ever generated!
So far, we have identified thousands of life-building molecules and millions of metabolic-like cycles, many of them described for the very first time! We explored fascinating cycles that produce additional copies of the molecules when reverted to the starting materials. This is known as self-replication, a hallmark of living matter!
Golem Network helped scientists to find answers
With Allchemy, the Golem Network, and people around the world who share their computing power, we can explore how life's key molecules combined to form the first chemical systems and better understand the origins of life.
People behind the Life on Golem
Sara Szymkuć
Allchemy
In 2019, obtained her PhD under the supervision of PROF. Bartosz Grzybowski,at the INSTITUTE OF ORGANIC CHEMISTRY PAS. During her PHD, she was one of the main developers of retrosynthetic software called CHEMATICA (now marketed worldwide as SYNTHIA). In late 2018, she co-founded ALLCHEMY, a startup aiming to explore synthesizable spaces of drug-like molecules.
Sara’s scientific interests center around computer-assisted design of new mechanisms and prebiotic chemistry.To date, she has co-authored over 20 publications in journals like NATURE, SCIENCE, or ANGEWANDTE CHEMIE.
Marcin Benke, PhD
Golem Network
Marcin Benke is a Research & Development consultant at Golem and an Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw. He obtained his PhD from the University of Warsaw in 1998. His academic experience includes a research fellowship at Cambridge University and a teaching/research position at Chalmers Technical University in Sweden.
Piotr ‘Viggith’ Janiuk
Golem Network
Piotr ‘Viggith’ Janiuk is the co-founder and CEO of the Golem Network. Viggith studied mathematics and computer science at the University of Warsaw before a career in computer programming. In 2015, he worked with Chematica on Computer-Assisted Synthetic Planning - a project combining chemical knowledge with network theory and chess-like algorithms, which enabled computers to design synthetic pathways to non-trivial targets.
