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14 Feb 1990

early life on earth

Oparin Haldane Theory

Early life conditions on earth

  • Atmospthere mainly composed of ammonia, water vapour, methane, carbon dioxide and nitrogen.
  • Little to no oxygen.
  • Reducing atmosphere.

Stages of reaching self replication

  • Abiotic synthesis of organic monomers.
  • Monomers join to form polymers.
  • Molecules coalesce into protoionts, droplets with membranes allowing them to maintain distinct internal chemistry.
  • Origin of self-replicating molecules.

What happened after?

  • As earth cooled, water vapour condensed into oceans and hydrogen was lost in space.
  • Oxygen's lack is crucial, it prevents oxidation of early compounds.
  • Energy required to form organics was provided by intense UV rays and lightning (young sun, no ozone).
  • The early oceans were a solution fo organics, dubbed the primitive soup.

Miller Urey experiment

  • Glass apparatus: gases like methane, ammonia and hydrogen.
  • Generate electric sparks while boiling water.
  • Condense/recirculate the compounds formed.
miller_urey.png

Results:

Compound percentage
Glycine 2.1
Glycolic acid 1.9
Alanine 1.7
Lactic acid 1.6
Formic acid 4.0
  • In anhydrous conditions, heat promotes polymerization/condensation by causing extraction of water molecules.
  • Even high yields of inorganic pyrophosphates can be synthesized by condensing cyanic acid on hydroxyapatite.

Protocells

  • Sperical array of lipids, that's self organized and endogenously ordered.
  • Enables selective permeability.
  • Examples include coacervates - droplets of charged organic material, proteinoid microspheres - water filled vesicles surrounded by protein boundary, and liposomes - vesicles surrounded by lipid bilayers.

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