ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Electron transport chains as a window into the earliest stages of evolution.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Overview of pathways and dynamic interactions of c-type cytochromes in Geobacter sulfurreducens.Biochemical Society transactions · 2026Review
- Programming Bio-Bio Electronic Interfaces for Light-Driven Interspecies Electron Transfer.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2026Article
- Photoholes within cyanobacterial mats can account for the origin of anammox bacteria and ancient nitrogen loss.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Protein Architecture Comparisons and the Reconstruction of the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA).Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2026Article
- Can the origin of biosynthetic routes be explained by a Frankenstein's monster-like spontaneous assembly of prebiotic reactants?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Dissecting Bioelectrical Networks in Photosynthetic Membranes with Electrochemistry.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2025Article
- Two Key Ferredoxins for Nitrogen Fixation Have Different Specificities and Biophysical Properties.Chemistry (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2025Article
- On the Origin of Information Dynamics in Early Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Age-invariant genes: multi-tissue identification and characterization of murine reference genes.Aging · 2025Article
- Evolution of Cellular Organization Along the First Branches of the Tree of Life.Journal of molecular evolution · 2024Article
- Introduction to the Special Issue on Early Evolution and the Last Common Ancestor.Journal of molecular evolution · 2024Article
- A New View of the Last Universal Common Ancestor.Journal of molecular evolution · 2024Article
- Protocellular Heme and Iron-Sulfur Clusters.Accounts of chemical research · 2024Review
- Regulation of Microalgal Photosynthetic Electron Transfer.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Age-Invariant Genes: Multi-Tissue Identification and Characterization of Murine Reference Genes.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Reconnoitering the sequence and structural analysis ofSaudi journal of biological sciences · 2023Article
- An Idea to Explore: From How to Why: Using Evolutionary Biochemistry to Inspire Biochemistry Education.Biochemistry and molecular biology education : a bimonthly publication of the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular BiologyArticle
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The origin and early evolution of life is generally studied under two different paradigms: bottom up and top down. Prebiotic chemistry and early Earth geochemistry allow researchers to explore possible origin of life scenarios. But for these "bottom-up" approaches, even successful experiments only amount to a proof of principle. On the other hand, "top-down" research on early evolutionary history is able to provide a historical account about ancient organisms, but is unable to investigate stages that occurred during and just after the origin of life. Here, we consider ancient electron transport chains (ETCs) as a potential bridge between early evolutionary history and a protocellular stage that preceded it. Current phylogenetic evidence suggests that ancestors of several extant ETC components were present at least as late as the last universal common ancestor of life. In addition, recent experiments have shown that some aspects of modern ETCs can be replicated by minerals, protocells, or organic cofactors in the absence of biological proteins. Here, we discuss the diversity of ETCs and other forms of chemiosmotic energy conservation, describe current work on the early evolution of membrane bioenergetics, and advocate for several lines of research to enhance this understanding by pairing top-down and bottom-up approaches.
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