The Life sustaining trio E-Book

Elena Grigorieva

• Herausgeber: novum publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 30

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Our planet Earth is home to many amazing, wonderful and beautiful plants, places and animals. How all that began, about 4 billion years ago, is also quite impressive, especially since our Earth was a lifeless hot rock exposed to radiation, electrical discharges, heat from erupting volcanoes and more! However, it turns out that those not-so-comfortable conditions were the exact mix needed to create the first building blocks of life. Some chemical elements, including hydrogen, oxygen and carbon, joined in variations to form certain molecules. Then, these small molecules also joined in different ways and formed carbon-based compounds. And it's these compounds that became the founders and essential parts of all forms of life. Read this book to find out just how life came to be on Planet Earth.

Leseprobe

Imprint

All rights of distribution, also through movies, radio and television, photomechanical reproduction, sound carrier, electronic medium and reprinting in excerpts are reserved.

© 2024 novum publishing

ISBN print edition:978-3-99146-663-5

ISBN e-book: 978-3-99146-664-2

Editor:Samantha Acker

Cover photo: Axel Kock | Dreamstime.com

Cover design, layout & typesetting: novum publishing

Internal illustrations: Elena Grigorieva

www.novum-publishing.co.uk

Foreword

The aim of this book is to give an easy-to-understand explanation of a very complex and difficult question of biology: When and how did the very first living organisms appear on Earth? This question has puzzled the curious minds of human beings for many centuries, and a great number of different suggestions and theories have been proposed and investigated. The ideas and answers have been progressing, together with the development of human civilisation. By the beginning of the 21stcentury, this knowledge has crystalised into a theory of evolution of life on Earth.

The scientific research of biological processes continues at the present time and gives more and more detailed answers but also creates more and more interesting questions. This is a fascinating process.

This book is addressed to those who would like to get a quick acquaintance with the whole theory of life, which is summarised in a few pages containing simple pictures and short descriptions.

Earth Before Life

For many of us living on Earth, the meaning of life is associated with the words communication, attraction and reproduction. Whereas reproduction is often associated with such words as competition, fight and sacrifice. It seems that such assumptions have been true for as long as life itself.

If we look back in time, about 4 billion years ago, we would probably have seen that similar associations could be applied to the interactions between different molecules appearing on Earth. At that time, our planet was a lifeless hot rock exposed to high-level ionising radiations, electrical discharges, mechanical pressure and heat coming from the erupting volcanos. Under those conditions, different chemical elements, mainly hydrogen (H), oxygen (O), carbon (C), nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and sulphur (S), joined together in different variations and formed molecules, such as dihydrogen oxide (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), dinitrogen (N2), ammonia (NH3), hydrogen cyanide (HCN), phosphorus dioxide (PO2) and hydrogen sulfide (H2S). These small molecules joined together in different variations and formed carbon-based compounds, some of which have become the founders and essential constituents of all forms of life on Earth.

Among such founders were amino acids, which combined into polypeptide chains and more complex compounds and proteins, with important physical and chemical properties.

Other important molecules were nucleotides, which formed long chains (polymers) of nucleic acids. Nucleotides such as adenine, guanine, cytosine and uracil, combined into a polynucleotide chain called ribonucleic acid (RNA).

RNA had several important properties. First, each of its nucleotides could establish a pair with another nucleotide. In particular, adenine could pair with uracil, and guanine with cytosine. Subsequently, a new polynucleotide chain (or strand) of RNA could be built up parallel to the original one and then separated, thereby producing a new RNA molecule. This process is calledreplication. Second, some RNA molecules folded into a specific shape. One part of such molecules could attach to a certain amino acid, whereas another part had a sequence of three adjacent nucleotides, which could bind to a matching sequence in a different nucleic acid. Such RNAs are called transfer RNAs, or tRNAs. Altogether, 20 different amino acids have an ability to attach to tRNAs.