It appears that life first emerged at least 3.8 billion years ago, approximately 750 million years after Earth was formed. How life originated and how the first cell came into being are matters of speculation, since these events cannot be reproduced in the laboratory. Nonetheless, several types of experiments provide important evidence bearing on some steps of the process.
It was first suggested
in the 1920s that simple organic molecules could form and spontaneously
polymerize into macromolecules under the conditions thought to exist in
primitive Earth’s atmosphere. At the time life arose, the atmosphere of Earth
is thought to have contained little or no free oxygen, instead consisting
principally of CO2 and N2 in addition to smaller amounts
of gases such as H2,
H2S, and CO. Such an atmosphere provides reducing conditions in which
organic molecules, given a source of energy such as sunlight or electrical discharge, can form
spontaneously. The spontaneous formation of organic molecules was first
demonstrated experimentally in the 1950s when Stanley Miller (then a graduate
student) showed that the discharge of electric sparks into a mixture of H2,
CH4, and NH3, in the presence of water, leads to the formation of a variety
of organic molecules, including several amino
acids (Figure 1.1). Although Miller’s experiments did not precisely
reproduce the conditions of primitive Earth, they clearly demonstrated the
plausibility of the spontaneous synthesis of organic molecules, providing the basic materials from which the
first living organisms arose.
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| Spontaneous formation of organic molecules |
The next step in evolution was the formation of macromolecules. The monomeric building blocks of macromolecules have been demonstrated to polymerize spontaneously under plausible prebiotic conditions. Heating dry mixtures of amino acids, for example, results in their polymerization to form polypeptides. But the critical characteristic of the macromolecule from which life evolved must have been the ability to replicate itself. Only a macromolecule capable of directing the synthesis of new copies of itself would have been capable of reproduction and further evolution. Of the two major classes of informational macromolecules in present-day cells (nucleic acids and proteins), only the nucleic acids are capable of directing their own self-replication. Nucleic acids can serve as templates for their own synthesis as a result of specific base pairing between complementary nucleotides (Figure 1.2). A critical step in understanding molecular evolution was thus reached in the early 1980s, when it was discovered in the laboratories of Sid Altman and Tom Cech that RNA is capable of catalyzing a number of chemical reactions, including the polymerization of nucleotides. Further studies have extended the known catalytic activities of RNA, including the description of RNA molecules that direct the synthesis of a new RNA strand from an RNA template. RNA is thus uniquely able to both serve as a template and to catalyze its own replication. Consequently, RNA is generally believed to have been the initial genetic system, and an early stage of chemical evolution is thought to have been based on self-replicating RNA molecules a period of evolution known as the RNA world. Ordered interactions between RNA and amino acids then evolved into the present-day genetic code, and DNA eventually replaced RNA as the genetic material.
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Self-replication
of RNA Complementary pairing between nucleotides (adenine [A] with uracil [U] and guanine [G] with
cytosine [C]) allows one strand of
RNA to serve as a template for the synthesis of a new strand with the
complementary sequence.
As discussed further in Chapter 4, all present-day cells use DNA as the genetic material and employ the same basic mechanisms for DNA replication and expression of the genetic information. Genes are the functional units of inheritance, corresponding to segments of DNA that encode proteins or RNA molecules. The nucleotide sequence of a gene is copied into RNA by a process called transcription. For RNAs that encode proteins, their nucleotide sequence is then used to specify the order of amino acids in a protein by a process called translation.
The first cell is
presumed to have arisen by the enclosure of self-replicating RNA in a membrane
composed of phospholipids (Figure 1.3). As discussed in detail in
the next chapter, phospholipids are the basic components of all present-day
biological membranes, including the plasma membranes of both prokaryotic and
eukaryotic cells. The key characteristic of the phospholipids that form
membranes is that they are amphipathic molecules, meaning that one
portion of the molecule is soluble in water and another portion is not.
Phospholipids have long, water-insoluble (hydrophobic) hydrocarbon
chains joined to water-soluble (hydrophilic) head groups that contain
phosphate. When placed in water, phospholipids spontaneously aggregate into a
bilayer with their phosphate-containing head groups on the outside in contact
with water and their hydrocarbon tails in the interior in contact with each
other. Such a phospholipid bilayer forms a stable barrier between two aqueous
compartments for example,
separating the interior of the cell from its external environment.
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Enclosure
of self-replicating RNA in a phospholipid membrane
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The first
cell is thought to have arisen by the enclosure of self-replicating RNA and
associated molecules in a membrane composed of phospholipids. Each phospholip-
id molecule has two long hydrophobic tails attached to a hydrophilic head
group. The hydrophobic tails are buried in the lipid bilayer; the hydrophilic
heads are exposed to water
on both sides of the membrane. |
The enclosure of self-replicating RNA and associated molecules in a phospholipid membrane would thus have maintained them as a unit, capable of self-reproduction and further evolution. RNA-directed protein synthesis may already have evolved by this time, in which case the first cell would have consisted of self-replicating RNA and its encoded proteins.
