α-keto

Once upon a time, when our planet Earth was very young and very new, there was not a single scrap of life on it to be found.Then, somewhere, somehow, some quirk of chemistry happened, and the molecular building blocks of our very first single-celled ancestors emerged: the amino acids and nucleic acids that came together in just the right way to continue a chain reaction that gave rise to life.  We're not entirely sure of the details of this emergence, which took place billions of years ago, and left no trace on the…