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.

生命的早期进化是一个有许多重大事件和许多开放性问题的时期。其中之一是代谢途径的进化，这意味着共同作用的酶的起源和组装。逆行假说是首次尝试解释代谢途径的起源和进化史；Norman Horowitz 提出了第一个重要假设。继这一想法之后，Sam Granick 提出了相关提案，提出了“前向假设”，然后是 Martynas Yčas 和 Roy Jensen 独立提出的“拼凑”组装的成功想法。从那以后，提出了一些新的假设；最具影响力的一个是由 Antonio Lazcano 和 Stanley Miller 在 Journal Molecular Evolution 中提出的，代谢途径的“半酶起源”。这篇文章被引用了 160 多次，包括在大多数关于新陈代谢早期进化的论文中，被认为是该领域有影响力的工作。分析了这项工作中提出的想法及其对研究生命起源和早期进化的影响。