2016 Volume 50 Issue 3 Pages 155-176
The origin of life must be studied through addressing a problem of the emergence of a free-energetically open complex system, rather than a problem of abiotic syntheses of various building blocks of life (Aono et al., 2015). One of the key aspects of the origin question is the origin of metabolism, since no (genetic) information may be preserved without ample and ordered materials supply. Thus, from the perspective of the origin of ‘proto-metabolism' we critically review currently prevailing approaches to the origin problem. Then, referring to the latest biological and geochemical findings, we will describe a scenario of the electrochemically driven emergence of ‘proto-metabolism' together with experimental proposals.
