Harrison B. Smith

This paper reconstructs the historical emergence of enzymatic folds using metabolic reaction networks, finding that enzyme evolution is embedded in metabolic interdependencies and that β-proteins dominated early metabolism.

The paper develops a three-level framework for analyzing stochastic chemical reaction systems, showing how constraints at earlier levels influence dynamics at later levels and applying it to biological sugar-phosphate chemistry.

The paper models ancient metabolic networks to show purine synthesis was a bottleneck in metabolic evolution, requiring non-autocatalytic phosphoryl agents and leading to coenzyme emergence.

The paper analyzes biochemical networks from individual and ecosystem-level data to show they are not scale-free, with no sharp transition in network structure across levels.

This paper assesses the viability of biochemical networks on other planets using Earth's geochemical data and planetary observations, finding that Enceladus lacks necessary compounds for alkaline prokaryotes' metabolism.

The paper constructs global biochemical networks from genomes and reactions to reveal universal scaling laws across biological organization levels.