ReviewProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2004
Universality in intermediary metabolism.
Review in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2004. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 130 papers.
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Who cites it
130 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Chiral symmetry breaking and information accumulation in pre-biological protocell evolution.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Prebiotic formation of thioesters via cyclic anhydrides as a key step in the emergence of metabolism.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Does metabolic rate influence genome-wide amino acid composition in the course of animal evolution?Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Nonenzymatic Hydration of Phosphoenolpyruvate: General Conditions for Hydration in Protometabolism by Searching Across Pathways.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2025Article
- Earth's Climate History Explains Life's Temperature Optima.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Fundamental constraints to the logic of living systems.Interface focus · 2024Review
- Rethinking life and predicting its origin.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2024Article
- Quantitative principles of microbial metabolism shared across scales.Nature microbiology · 2024Review
- Metagenomic insights into Heimdallarchaeia clades from the deep-sea cold seep and hydrothermal vent.Environmental microbiome · 2024Article
- Primitive purine biosynthesis connects ancient geochemistry to modern metabolism.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Complex II ambiguities-FADHThe Journal of biological chemistry · 2024Review
- Spatiotemporal metabolic responses to water deficit stress in distinct leaf cell-types of poplar.Frontiers in plant science · 2024Article
- Toward the Relational Formulation of Biological Thermodynamics.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Aqueous microdroplets promote C-C bond formation and sequences in the reverse tricarboxylic acid cycle.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Self-organization of primitive metabolic cycles due to non-reciprocal interactions.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Metabolic homeostasis and growth in abiotic cells.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
70 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We analyze the stoichiometry, energetics, and reaction concentration dependence of the reductive tricarboxylic acid (rTCA) cycle as a universal and possibly primordial metabolic core. The rTCA reaction sequence is a network-autocatalytic cycle along the relaxation pathway for redox couples in nonequilibrium reducing environments, which provides starting organic compounds for the synthesis of all major classes of biomolecules. The concentration dependence of its reactions suggests it as a precellular bulk process. We propose that rTCA is statistically favored among competing redox relaxation pathways under early-earth conditions and that this feature drove its emergence and also accounts for its evolutionary robustness and universality. The ability to enhance the rate of core reactions creates an energetic basis for selection of subsequent layers of biological complexity.
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