A collaborative team of scientists has discovered that life on Earth over three billion years ago relied on the metal molybdenum, which was incredibly scarce in the environment at the time. The study, published in Nature Communications, is the first to show that molybdenum was used by ancient life this far back in our planet’s history.

On Earth today, molybdenum helps speed up vital biochemical reactions in cells. The metal is a component of essential enzymes that drive several major biological reactions in organisms. This is not only important for individual organisms, but also biogeochemical cycles, such as the nitrogen cycle, which affect our entire planet. Without molybdenum, those important reactions could still happen in nature, but they would be too slow to sustain life.

“Molybdenum sits at the catalytic center of enzymes that run major carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur reactions,” explained Betül Kaçar, head of the Kaçar Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and senior author on the study. Kaçar leads MUSE, a NASA Interdisciplinary Consortia for Astrobiology Research (ICAR) at UW-Madison.