ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2025
The emergence of metabolisms through Earth history and implications for biospheric evolution.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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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.
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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.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Phylogenetic reconciliation supports a methanogenic ancestor of the Archaea and a derived origin for host-associated lineages.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Abiotic sources of fixed nitrogen sustained early ecosystems for several hundred million years after the origin of life.Science advances · 2026Article
- Biological use of molybdenum and tungsten stems back to 3.4 billion years ago.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The Origin of Life and Cellular Systems: A Continuum from Prebiotic Chemistry to Biodiversity.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Chance and purpose in the evolution of biospheres.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The emergence of metabolisms through Earth history and implications for biospheric evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The evolution of Gaia(s).Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
We investigate the evolution of microbial metabolisms from the last universal common ancestor to the extant biota through comparative phylogenomics, reconciling the evolution of the genes that underpin metabolic pathways with a time-calibrated tree of life. We find that the majority of metabolic pathways were established within the first 2 billion years of Earth history, with pathways accreting at different rates. Methanogenesis and acetogenesis are recovered to be among the earliest energy metabolisms, whereas photosynthetic pathways achieved completeness by 2 Ga, much later than most previous studies have envisaged. Horizontal exchange of metabolic genes is widespread, but it has occurred largely among closely related lineages and for some pathways there is a strong signal of vertical inheritance. We also find that the rate of horizontal gene transfer has been higher in Bacteria than in Archaea through evolutionary history. Finally, we evaluate how our reconstructed history of metabolism can help to constrain hypotheses of biospheric evolution, considering the entropic and Darwinized Gaia hypotheses as well as a simple neutral model for the assembly of biogeochemical cycles.This article is part of the discussion meeting issue 'Chance and purpose in the evolution of biospheres'.
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