ArticlePloS one2012
The enzymatic and metabolic capabilities of early life.
Article in PloS one, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 29 citations in OpenAlex.
- Early Evolution of the Prokaryotic Transcription Factor Repertoire.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Universal paralogs provide a window into evolution before the last universal common ancestor.Cell genomics · 2026Review
- A new LUCApedia database for data-driven research on early evolutionary history.Bioinformatics advances · 2026Article
- Architecture, Function, Regulation, and Evolution of α-Glucans Metabolic Enzymes in Prokaryotes.Chemical reviews · 2024Review
- A consensus view of the proteome of the last universal common ancestor.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Potassium at the Origins of Life: Did Biology Emerge from Biotite in Micaceous Clay?Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Seasonality of Glacial Snow and Ice Microbial Communities.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Article
- The requirement of cellularity for abiogenesis.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2021Review
- The Role of Gene Duplication in the Divergence of Enzyme Function: A Comparative Approach.Frontiers in genetics · 2021Article
- A New Analysis of Archaea-Bacteria Domain Separation: Variable Phylogenetic Distance and the Tempo of Early Evolution.Molecular biology and evolution · 2020Article
- Reactivity of Metabolic Intermediates and Cofactor Stability under Model Early Earth Conditions.Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life · 2020Article
- Emerging Frontiers in the Study of Molecular Evolution.Journal of molecular evolution · 2020Article
- Article
- Phylogenetic Reconstruction Shows Independent Evolutionary Origins of Mitochondrial Transcription Factors from an Ancient Family of RNA Methyltransferase Proteins.Journal of molecular evolution · 2018Article
- The Astrobiology Primer v2.0.Astrobiology · 2016Review
- Exploring Polypharmacology in Drug Discovery and Repurposing Using the CANDO Platform.Current pharmaceutical design · 2016Review
- The TIM Barrel Architecture Facilitated the Early Evolution of Protein-Mediated Metabolism.Journal of molecular evolution · 2016Article
- Crystallization around solid-like nanosized docks can explain the specificity, diversity, and stability of membrane microdomains.Frontiers in plant science · 2014Article
- The Promise and Challenge of Digital Biology.Journal of bioengineering & biomedical science · 2013Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
We introduce the concept of metaconsensus and employ it to make high confidence predictions of early enzyme functions and the metabolic properties that they may have produced. Several independent studies have used comparative bioinformatics methods to identify taxonomically broad features of genomic sequence data, protein structure data, and metabolic pathway data in order to predict physiological features that were present in early, ancestral life forms. But all such methods carry with them some level of technical bias. Here, we cross-reference the results of these previous studies to determine enzyme functions predicted to be ancient by multiple methods. We survey modern metabolic pathways to identify those that maintain the highest frequency of metaconsensus enzymes. Using the full set of modern reactions catalyzed by these metaconsensus enzyme functions, we reconstruct a representative metabolic network that may reflect the core metabolism of early life forms. Our results show that ten enzyme functions, four hydrolases, three transferases, one oxidoreductase, one lyase, and one ligase, are determined by metaconsensus to be present at least as late as the last universal common ancestor. Subnetworks within central metabolic processes related to sugar and starch metabolism, amino acid biosynthesis, phospholipid metabolism, and CoA biosynthesis, have high frequencies of these enzyme functions. We demonstrate that a large metabolic network can be generated from this small number of enzyme functions.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.