The Semi-Enzymatic Origin of Metabolic Pathways: Inferring a Very Early Stage of the Evolution of Life

The early evolution of life is a period with many important events with a lot of big and open questions. One of them is the evolution of metabolic pathways, which means the origin and assembly of enzymes that act together. The retrograde hypothesis was the first attempt to explain the origin and evolutionary history of metabolic pathways; Norman Horowitz developed this first significant hypothesis. This idea was followed by relevant proposals developed by Sam Granick, who proposed the "forward direction hypothesis," and then the successful idea of "Patchwork" assembly proposed independently by Martynas Yčas and Roy Jensen. Since then, a few new hypotheses were proposed; one of the most influential was made by Antonio Lazcano and Stanley Miller in the Journal Molecular Evolution, the "semi-enzymatic origin" of metabolic pathways. This article was cited more than 160 times, including in most papers published about the early evolution of metabolism, placing it as influential work in the field. The ideas proposed in this work and their effects on studying the origin and early evolution of life are analyzed.