Researchers at Rutgers and the City College of New York announced that it could be a strong contender for the title “the substance that started life on Earth.” The group isolated a peptide they believed was simple and active enough to jump out of the primitive broth and start working on its own.

“Scientists believe there was a tipping point somewhere between 3.5 and 3.8 billion years ago, something that triggered the transition from prebiotic chemistry (pre-life molecules) to living biological systems,” said Vikas Nanda, a researcher at Rutgers. The authors research, the press release says. “We believe the change was caused by a few small precursor proteins that performed important steps in an ancient metabolic reaction. And we think we’ve found one of these ‘precursor peptides’.

And his name is… Nickelback. For this reason. Nickelback may be part of the reason life exists on Earth.

Researchers weren’t just too interested in Canadian hard rock in the late ’90s – the moniker has a scientific reason. Nickelback is a peptide consisting of 13 amino acids that bind to two nickel ions. While they don’t make up the lion’s share of chemistry, they seem to be a critical part of what researchers believe the peptide could be such a good candidate for the beginning of life.

Nickel ions act as powerful catalysts when bound to the rest of the peptide, allowing the entire substance to produce hydrogen gas, which can be an excellent source of energy for metabolic processes. And given that nickel was fairly common on early Earth, it’s possible for two nickel ions to self-attach to an existing peptide.

This discovery was the result of extensive work aimed at isolating the catalysts of primitive life. To find the best candidates for honor, the team sought to develop substances that may have started life from what we now know, starting with the proteins involved in today’s metabolism and working backwards to reduce them to the basic structure.

Their process led researchers to several islands, but the most promising was Nickelback. Because of the simplicity of the design, it made sense given the ingredients that would have been abundant in primitive broth and its ability to generate significant amounts of energy for metabolism.