A symbiotic view of the origin of life at hydrothermal impact crater-lakes

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (30) ◽  
pp. 20033-20046 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sankar Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Hydrothermal Vents ◽  
Impact Crater ◽  
Crater Lakes ◽  
Origin And Evolution ◽  
The Origin Of Life ◽  
Life On Earth

Submarine hydrothermal vents are generally considered as the likely habitats for the origin and evolution of early life on Earth.

scholarly journals Origins of Life

2020 ◽  
pp. 2-7
Author(s):  
Hannah Mahoney
Keyword(s):  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Hydrothermal Vents ◽  
Rna World ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Specific Chemical ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
Earth Environment ◽  
The Origin Of Life ◽  
Life On Earth

When, where, and how did life on Earth originate? The origin of life problem involves multiple scientific disciplines and has spanned multiple decades. It can be summarized into three stages: (1) the origin of biological monomers, (2) the origin of biological polymers, and (3) the emergence and evolution of cells. While highly speculative, the connections between these stages are theorized by attempting to determine the geochemical situations which could have driven chemical evolution and allow for the emergence of specific chemical functions of biological systems. This review summarizes reported findings relevant to the early Earth environment and the main theories in the origin of life subject. Specific focus is placed on the metabolism first, RNA world, and compartmentalization first theories as they are involved in the origin of life paradox. The review then discusses submarine hydrothermal vents as a possible location for which life could have occurred. Understanding of information pertaining to the origin of life is important as it allows for advancement and discoveries in other fields of science and medicine. Overall, the aim of this review is to display the relevant information about the origin of life theory and highlight the importance of future research.

The Origin of Life

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Blair Hedges
Keyword(s):  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Hydrothermal Vents ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Early Time ◽  
Molecular Clocks ◽  
Time Period ◽  
A Cell ◽  
The Origin Of Life ◽  
Successive Generations ◽  
Life On Earth

Biological evolution begins with the origin of life, but the subject is the perhaps the most interdisciplinary of any in science. Understanding how life began on Earth requires knowledge of the astronomical, geological, and atmospheric settings. However, those settings are in turn dependent on knowing the time period when life arose, which comes from the fossil and molecular records, including molecular clocks based on genetic mutations. Interrelated with the setting is the chemistry that generates the organic molecules used to assemble the first cells and carry the genetic information to successive generations of cells. But holding the chemical reactions and products together in a cell requires a membrane, and the assembly of that involves biophysics. Thus, we have all of the fields of science coming together to understand a single event that happened about four billion years ago and initiated the Tree of Life on Earth. Because little evidence of anything has remained from this early time, there have been enormous amounts of published speculation on this subject. Narratives on how life originated can be grouped by location (surface versus submarine hydrothermal vents), temperature (cold versus hot), source of energy (heterotrophic versus autotrophic), and evolutionary order (genetics-first versus metabolism-first). I use the last dichotomy here, only because it has a long history and renewed focus in recent years. Currently there is no consensus on any one theory for the origin of life, but this is an active field that has made great strides in recent decades.

scholarly journals Defining the envelope for the search for life in the Universe

2009 ◽  
Vol 5 (H15) ◽  
pp. 697-698
Author(s):  
Lynn J. Rothschild
Keyword(s):  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Chemical Parameters ◽  
Theoretical Possibility ◽  
Origin And Evolution ◽  
Set Constraints ◽  
The Origin Of Life ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
Physical And Chemical ◽  
The Universe

AbstractThe search for life in the universe relies on defining the limits for life and finding suitable conditions for its origin and evolution elsewhere. From the biological perspective, a conservative approach uses life on earth to set constraints on the environments in which life can live. Conditions for the origin of life, even on earth, cannot yet be defined with certainty. Thus, we will describe what is known about conditions for the origin of life and limits to life on earth as a template for life elsewhere, with a particular emphasis on such physical and chemical parameters as temperature, pH, salinity, desiccation and radiation. But, other life forms could exist, thus extending the theoretical possibility for life elsewhere. Yet, this potential is not limitless, and so constraints for life in the universe will be suggested.

Pyrite and the Origins of Life

Pyrite ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Rickard
Keyword(s):  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Origins Of Life ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Ancient India ◽  
Pyrite Formation ◽  
The Origin Of Life ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
The Relationship

If you have been reading this book since the beginning, you will not be surprised by now to find that you have come across a chapter documenting the involvement of pyrite in the origin of life. This is because you will have read in this book how pyrite has been at the root of many fundamental discoveries about the nature of our world. So you do not suffer more than eyebrow-raising surprise and maybe a gentle throat-clearing in learning that pyrite is contributing to our current understanding of the origins of life. By contrast, if you have dived in at Chapter 9 you probably look at the title of this chapter with disbelief. After all, what could be the connection between a common glitzy mineral and the origin of life? The more diligent reader will have already learned that pyrite formation is intimately associated with biology because most of it is produced by bacteria that extract their oxygen from sulfate and produce hydrogen sulfide. This relationship is so overweening today that pyrite formation controls many fundamental aspects of the Earth’s environment. So what happens if we extend this line of inquiry back to the beginnings of geologic time? We have already seen that the characteristics of ancient pyrite are one of the main sources of information about the nature of the early Earth. The consequence of this is that we know quite a bit about the relationship between pyrite and early life on Earth. In this chapter, we further explore this and review the laboratory work that implicates pyrite itself in the original syntheses of the self-replicating biomolecules that assembled to produce Earth’s first life forms. The thesis that life developed from nonbiological chemistry is a very old idea stretching back through Anaximander in 6th-century BCE Greece to the Vedic writings of ancient India around 1500 BCE and is often called abiogenesis.

scholarly journals ‘Whole Organism’, Systems Biology, and Top-Down Criteria for Evaluating Scenarios for the Origin of Life

Life ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 690
Author(s):  
Clifford F. Brunk ◽  
Charles R. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Chemical Systems ◽  
Biochemical Pathways ◽  
The Origin Of Life ◽  
Energy And Material Flows ◽  
Complex Scenario ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
Physical Laws ◽  
Equilibrium Chemical

While most advances in the study of the origin of life on Earth (OoLoE) are piecemeal, tested against the laws of chemistry and physics, ultimately the goal is to develop an overall scenario for life’s origin(s). However, the dimensionality of non-equilibrium chemical systems, from the range of possible boundary conditions and chemical interactions, renders the application of chemical and physical laws difficult. Here we outline a set of simple criteria for evaluating OoLoE scenarios. These include the need for containment, steady energy and material flows, and structured spatial heterogeneity from the outset. The Principle of Continuity, the fact that all life today was derived from first life, suggests favoring scenarios with fewer non-analog (not seen in life today) to analog (seen in life today) transitions in the inferred first biochemical pathways. Top-down data also indicate that a complex metabolism predated ribozymes and enzymes, and that full cellular autonomy and motility occurred post-LUCA. Using these criteria, we find the alkaline hydrothermal vent microchamber complex scenario with a late evolving exploitation of the natural occurring pH (or Na+ gradient) by ATP synthase the most compelling. However, there are as yet so many unknowns, we also advocate for the continued development of as many plausible scenarios as possible.

What is life?

1997 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Maynard Smith ◽  
Eors Szathmary
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Definition Of Life ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Physical Processes ◽  
Living Things ◽  
Survival And Reproduction ◽  
The Origin Of Life ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Life On Earth

Imagine that, when the first spacemen step out of their craft onto the surface of one of the moons of Jupiter, they are confronted by an object the size of a horse, rolling towards them on wheels, and bearing on its back a concave disc pointing towards the Sun. They will at once conclude that the object is alive, or has been made by something alive. If all they find is a purple smear on the surface of the rocks, they will have to work harder to decide. This is the phenotypic approach to the definition of life: a thing is alive if it has parts, or ‘organs’, which perform functions. William Paley explained the machine-like nature of life by the existence of a creator: today, we would invoke natural selection. There are, however, dangers in assuming that any entity with the properties of a self-regulating machine is alive, or an artefact. In section 2.2, we tell the story of a self-regulating atomic reactor, the Oklo reactor, which is neither. This story can be taken in one of three ways. First, it shows the dangers of the phenotypic definition of life: not all complex entities are alive. Second, it illustrates how the accidents of history can give rise spontaneously to surprisingly complex machine-like entities. The relevance of this to the origin of life is obvious. In essence, the problem is the following. How could chemical and physical processes give rise, without natural selection, to entities capable of hereditary replication, which would therefore, from then on, evolve by natural selection? The Oklo reactor is an example of what can happen. Finally, section 2.2 can simply be skipped: the events were interesting, but do not resemble in detail those that led to the origin of life on Earth. There is an alternative to the phenotypic definition of life. It is to define as alive any entities that have the properties of multiplication, variation and heredity. The logic behind this definition, first proposed by Muller (1966), is that a population of entities with these properties will evolve by natural selection, and hence can be expected to acquire the complex adaptations for survival and reproduction that are characteristic of living things.

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