Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

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We are so aware of the vast amounts of information stored in our genes, that we sometimes overlook the obvious. There’s no difference in the information content between a living organism and one that died a moment ago. What stopped was metabolism. This is probably the best book on biology (and more specifically biochemistry) that I've ever read. Plants make use of rubisco for photosynthesis. Rubisco is inefficient and is as likely to fix CO2 as O2. CO2 levels were high when the molecule evolved, but even today the buildup of CO2 within the leaf causes crops to lose as much as one quarter of their yield. Amazingly, rubisco now turns out to be widespread in ancient bacteria, doing a totally different job: degrading sugars derived from the RNA of other cells, to support growth fueled by eating other cells.

a b Requarth, Tim (20 July 2015). "Book Review: Taking on 'The Vital Question' About Life". The New York Times. His book, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, won the 2010 Royal Society Prize for Science Books. [5] He appeared on In Our Time on Radio Four on 13 September 2012, when the topic of discussion was the cell, [6] and again on 15 May 2014, when the topic was photosynthesis. [7] Books [ edit ] The reverse Krebs cycle requires an input of energy (ATP) to work, which in modern bacteria is normally obtained from photosynthesis. H2 will react with CO2, using iron–sulfide catalysts, but works best at pressures of around 100 bar, equivalent to an ocean depth of about 1 kilometre. The Krebs cycle never really operated as a true cycle except in the most highly energetic cells, like the flight muscles of pigeons, where it was first discovered. In most cells, the Krebs cycle is more like a roundabout than a cycle, with things coming in and going out at different points. And it’s a roundabout that can go in both directions, so it’s kind of messy. How was the rise of oxygen connected to the favored direction of metabolic flux and the evolution of the first multicellular animals?Your book argues that the flow of energy and matter structures the evolution of life and is how metabolism “ conjures genes into existence. ” What’s the most compelling reason to think metabolism, not genetic information, evolved first?

Lane has come to believe that the structure of cells is less important than what goes on within them, an idea with both theoretical and practical implications. It challenges the accepted theory of life on Earth emerging from a “primordial soup” on the planet’s surface and instead shifts the genesis to undersea thermal vents. It replaces the buildup of genetic mutations as the cause of aging and cancer with the slowing of cellular activity. And it imagines consciousness as the humming electrical fields of cell membranes. Even though nonscientists won’t be able to judge whether Lane makes a convincing case, he is periodically quite clear on his goals. Early on, he posits the essential question as “genes first or metabolism first? The thrust of this book is that energy is primal — energy flow shapes genetic information.” Later, he restates the proposition with added whimsy: From the renowned biochemist and author of The Vital Question, an illuminating inquiry into the Krebs cycle and the origins of life. Once cells similar to bacteria (the first prokaryotes, cells without a nucleus) had emerged, he writes, they stayed like that for two and a half billion years. Then, just once, cells jumped in complexity and size, acquiring a nucleus and other organelles, and complex behavioural features including sex, which he notes have become universal in complex ( eukaryotic) life forms including plants, animals, and fungi. [17] Now, in contrast, there was this mysterious group of simple organisms called the Ediacaran fauna. They lived about 200 meters deep in the ocean and fell extinct right before the Cambrian explosion about 540 million years ago, when oxygen levels in the environment fell. The Ediacaran fauna didn’t have much tissue differentiation, and they could only do one thing biochemically at a time. When oxygen levels fell right before the Cambrian, they couldn’t adapt to the new environments.From the renowned biochemist and author of The Vital Question , an illuminating inquiry into the Krebs cycle and the origins of life. The chances of life starting on an oxygenated planet are arguably close to zero: hydrogen must react with CO2 to form organic molecules, but does so very reluctantly if at all in the presence of oxygen Lane explains cellular processes for producing energy particularly cellular respiration in animals. He recounts the history of key discoveries that underlie our understanding of cellular respiration and profiles the scientists involved. He compares cellular respiration with photosynthesis in plants and variants of these processes in microbes, pointing out the similarities and differences. He shows how early forms of the same processes could have initiated life detailing a specific scenario in hydrothermal vents. Lane explores how cellular respiration impacts health and aging. He makes the case that increasing dysfunction in cellular respiration is a primary factor in the increased rate of cancer and Alzheimer’s as we age and in aging itself. Lane’s focus on energy and the essential dynamism of life has been an important thread running through his research. One of the most creative of today’s biologists, his work ranges from the evolution of sex and the rise of planetary oxygen to the origin of complex cells and the first life on Earth. Fuller, Barry; Benson, Erica, eds. (2004). Life in the Frozen State. CRC Press. ISBN 978-0415247009.

Unlike most popular science books, this one is short on “wow factor”— information amazing enough to wake up the non-specialist nodding off amongst the molecules. But it does reveal that we’re each made of up “at least 30 trillion cells,” all of which go through “a billion metabolic reactions every second.” That means the cells of a man in his mid-50s like the book’s author have already gone through reactions numbering 10 to the 32nd power, “roughly a billion times the number of stars in the known universe.”

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To grasp the Krebs cycle is to fathom the deep coherence of biology. It connects the first photosynthetic bacteria with our own peculiar cells. It links the emergence of consciousness with the inevitability of death. And it puts the subtle differences between individuals in the same grand story as the rise of the living world itself. Lane is among the vanguard of researchers asking why the Krebs cycle, the “perfect circle” at the heart of metabolism, remains so elusive more than eighty years after its discovery. Transformer is Lane’s voyage, as a biochemist, to find the inner meaning of the Krebs cycle—and its reverse—why it is still spinning at the heart of life and death today. Rampelotto, Pabulo Henrique (26 April 2010). Panspermia: A Promising Field of Research (PDF). Astrobiology Science Conference 2010. Houston, Texas: Lunar and Planetary Institute. p.5224. Bibcode: 2010LPICo1538.5224R. Archived (PDF) from the original on 27 March 2016 . Retrieved 3 December 2014. What does Lane say is the best thing we can do to have long healthy lives? You’d never guess. Eat a modest quantity of healthy food and stay active. 🙂 But be aware, there’s a large element of chance in health.

But as soon as you have multiple tissues, you can do things in parallel. You can balance what this tissue is doing with what that tissue is doing. You can’t do energy and biosynthesis equally at the same time very easily — it’s easier to do one or the other. That kind of forces us to have different metabolisms in different tissues. The purist view of “information first” is the RNA world, where some process in the environment makes nucleotides, and the nucleotides go through a process that makes them link up into polymer chains. Then we have a population of RNAs, and they invent everything, because they’re capable of both catalyzing reactions and copying themselves. But then how did the RNAs invent all of metabolism, cells, spatial structure and so on? Genes don’t actually do that even today. Cells come from cells, and genes go along for the ride. So why would genes do it at the very beginning? So this chemistry is thermodynamically favored. It’s just these first steps which are recalcitrant, but the electrical charges on the hydrothermal vent seem to lower the barrier to that first step, so the rest can happen. In effect what you have is a continuous flow of hydrothermal fluids going through this electrochemical reaction, converting gases in the environment into more organic molecules, which you can imagine snuggling into the cell-like pores, structuring themselves into cell-like entities and making more of themselves. It’s a very rough form of growth, but it’s lifelike in that sense. But then how did these first proto-cells become independent from the proton gradients they got for free in the hydrothermal vents?The Krebs cycle is more of a roundabout than a complete cycle. The traffic flow of metabolism has to be controlled to do particular jobs. The single-celled organisms that came before animals could mostly do one thing at a time, so they needed to adjust their traffic flow. But animals have multiple tissues and can balance traffic flow through the Krebs cycle in one tissue differently than in another tissue. It’s a kind of symbiosis between mutually dependent tissues. Hugely ambitious and tremendously exciting ... Transformer shows how a molecular dance from the dawn of time still sculpts our lives today. I read with rapt attention’ The third peculiarity is the genetic code itself. There are clues that hint at direct interactions between the letters in DNA and the amino acids of proteins. This means the code is not random. A random piece of RNA will template a small protein, giving it a sequence that is specified by those non-random interactions. If that speeds up metabolism—the Krebs cycle for example—then the random sequence will be selected. And that means there’s no problem with the origin of information in biology. 3. The first animals evolved through a high-wire metabolic balancing act. The Krebs cycle is a series of chemical reactions that take place (in part or entirely) in most living organisms. Running in one direction it explains respiration, the process by which organic molecules undergo controlled combustion to produce energy, while in reverse it is one of the ways that complex organic molecules can be constructed. At the same time we see the importance of flows of energy and electrical potentials in understanding life. It's heady stuff. Lane goes on to show how the same processes that support life can produce cancers - and why these processes change over time, resulting in ageing and death. An exhilarating account of the biophysics of life, stretching from the first stirrings of living matter to the psychology of consciousness. I felt as if I was there, every step of the way’