Free energy conversion in the LUCA: Quo vadis?
Open accessAbstract
Living entities are unimaginable without means to harvest free energy from the environment, that is, without bioenergetics. The quest to understand the bioenergetic ways of early life therefore is one of the crucial elements to understand the emergence of life on our planet. Over the last few years, several mutually exclusive scenarios for primordial bioenergetics have been put forward, all of which are based on some sort of empirical observation, a remarkable step forward from the previous, essentially untestable, ab initio models. We here try to present and compare these scenarios while at the same time discuss their respective empirical weaknesses. The goal of this article is to harness crucial new expertise from the entire field by stimulating a larger part of the bioenergetics community to become involved in "origin-of-energy-metabolism" research. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: 18th European Bioenergetic Conference.
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These observations to a degree support emergence of life models that propose pH gradients as a prebiotic source of energy.
“These observations seemingly indicate that LUCA is more recent than the evolution electron transport energetics, and to a degree support emergence of life models that propose pH gradients as a prebiotic source of energy (e.g.Lane et al. 2010;Ducluzeau et al. 2014;Camprubi et al. 2017;Ooka et al. 2018).”
From The Emergence of Life (2019) · cites this paper as Ducluzeau et al. 2014
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References 60 · Cited by 27
- Authors
- Ducluzeau, A.-L., Schoepp-Cothenet, B., Baymann, F., Russell, M. J., & Nitschke, W.
- Affiliations
- University of Nebraska–Lincoln (US)
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR)
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory (US)
- Corresponding author
- Nitschke, Wolfgang
- Venue
- Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) - Bioenergetics
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2014-07
- Volume
- 1837
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- 982-988
- ISSN
- 0005-2728 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2049120972
- Cited by
- 27
- References
- 60
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 1 · 2020: 1 · 2019: 4 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 2 · 2014: 6
- FWCI
- 0.27
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) - Bioenergetics (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- HAL (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- NASA Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology (NNH06ZDA001N)
- NASA Astrobiology Institute (Icy Worlds)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Astronomy and Astrophysics › Origins and Evolution of Life
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › RNA and protein synthesis mechanisms
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Microbial metabolism and enzyme function
- Keywords
- LUCA, origin of life, early life, metabolic pathways, comparative genomics
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Bacterial Proteins, Energy Metabolism, Oxidoreductases, Plant Proteins, Evolution, Molecular
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