Comment by greenbit
3 hours ago
This is great, if you have significant amounts of free oxygen to work with, which early earth evidently did not. Would be interesting to see if anaerobic metabolism could also occur without cellular confinement.
3 hours ago
This is great, if you have significant amounts of free oxygen to work with, which early earth evidently did not. Would be interesting to see if anaerobic metabolism could also occur without cellular confinement.
It can, that's the reason why UHT milk has a relatively short shelf lifespan and degrades despite being devoid of living microorganisms. The enzymes keep doing their work long after the cell membrane is gone.
You might be thinking of something else. UHT has a very long shelf life compared to other forms of liquid milk.
Biochemists have been doing just that for like 100 years. They'd take a bunch of yeast, grind the cells into a slurry releasing whatever is inside, separate the cell debris, and perform experiments measuring fermentation rate.