The right answer is all of the above
A metabolic pathway is a set of chemical reactions taking place in a living cell and catalyzed by a series of enzymes that act sequentially. Each reaction is a step in a complex process of synthesis or degradation of a final biological molecule. In a metabolic pathway, the product of the enzyme catalyzed reaction serves as a substrate for the next reaction.
The metabolic pathways can be linear, branched (or branched), or even cyclic. The initial, intermediate or final compounds produced in these pathways are called metabolites. Living cells have a large number of metabolic pathways, often connected to each other, that make up the cellular metabolic network.
We distinguish the metabolic pathways leading to the synthesis of a molecule, called anabolic pathways, and those that allow the degradation of a compound, called catabolic pathways.
The metabolic pathways are often regulated in a coordinated way, to allow to adapt the flow of synthesis of a given product to the needs of the organism. The regulation can be enzymatic, by modulating the activity of one of the first enzymes of the pathway, often allosterically. Regulation can also be genetic, by modulating the expression of genes encoding the enzymes of the pathway. These regulatory mechanisms are one of the essential means of maintaining cellular homeostasis, that is to say the dynamic equilibrium of the components of the cell.
