Physiology teaches us that metabolism is plastic and modular: microbes in particular attach and detach catalytic components from metabolic networks in ways which dramatically alters their flux-physiology characteristics. While understanding this is a key for understanding life today, the same plasticity and modularity poses questions for how metabolism may have first been built out. In this talk I’ll discuss some recent network approaches which can be used to frame questions about metabolic evolution with an eye towards learning about early metabolism. I’ll also give us some examples of modularity and plasticity we see today, which raise a perennial question in evolution: how can we infer directionality in evolutionary data? Altogether I hope this will be fodder for more detailed and collaborative and integrative discussions together at the workshop.

The talk is part of the Computational Approaches to Early Evolution Workshop (April 20-24, 2026)