ReviewPhilosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences2022
Protometabolism as out-of-equilibrium chemistry.
Review in Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Growth of fatty acid vesicles coupled with amino acid sequences of peptides toward evolvable protocells.Communications chemistry · 2026Article
- Enzyme Catalytic Parameters and Evolution Across the Dissipation Plane.International journal of molecular sciences · 2026Review
- Article
- Stimuli-Responsive Chemical Systems That Mimic Biological Dynamics.Chemistry (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2026Review
- Exploring the Evolution-Coupling Hypothesis: Do Enzymes' Performance Gains Correlate with Increased Dissipation?Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- On the Emergence of Autonomous Chemical Systems through Dissipation Kinetics.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Serpentinization-Associated Mineral Catalysis of the Protometabolic Formose System.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Histidine Ligated Iron-Sulfur Peptides.Chembiochem : a European journal of chemical biology · 2022Article
- From the origin of life to pandemics: emergent phenomena in complex systems.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It is common to compare life with machines. Both consume fuel and release waste to run. In biology, the engine that drives the living system is referred to as metabolism. However, attempts at deciphering the origins of metabolism do not focus on this energetic relationship that sustains life but rather concentrate on nonenzymatic reactions that produce all the intermediates of an extant metabolic pathway. Such an approach is akin to studying the molecules produced from the burning of coal instead of deciphering how the released energy drives the movement of pistons and ultimately the train when investigating the mechanisms behind locomotion. Theories that do explicitly invoke geological chemical gradients to drive metabolism most frequently feature hydrothermal vent conditions, but hydrothermal vents are not the only regions of the early Earth that could have provided the fuel necessary to sustain the Earth's first (proto)cells. Here, we give examples of prior reports on protometabolism and highlight how more recent investigations of out-of-equilibrium systems may point to alternative scenarios more consistent with the majority of prebiotic chemistry data accumulated thus far. This article is part of the theme issue 'Emergent phenomena in complex physical and socio-technical systems: from cells to societies'.
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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.