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Full Description
This is a textbook covering the transition from energy releasing reactions on the early Earth to energy releasing reactions that fueled growth in the first microbial cells. It is for teachers and college students with an interest in microbiology, geosciences, biochemistry, evolution, or all of the above. The scope of the book is a quantum departure from existing "origin of life" books in that it starts with basic chemistry and links energy-releasing geochemical processes to the reactions of microbial metabolism. The text reaches across disciplines, providing students of the geosciences an origins/biology interface and bringing a geochemistry/origins interface to students of microbiology and evolution. Beginning with physical chemistry and transitioning across metabolic networks into microbiology, the timeline documents chemical events and organizational states in hydrothermal vents - the only environments known that bridge the gap between spontaneous chemical reactions that we can still observe in nature today and the physiology of microbes that live from H2, CO2, ammonia, phosphorus, inorganic salts and water. Life is a chemical reaction. What it is and how it arose are two sides of the same coin.
Key Features
Provides clear connections between geochemical reactions and microbial metabolism
Focuses on chemical mechanisms and transition metals
Richly illustrated with color figures explaining reactions and processes
Covers the origin of the Earth, the origin of metabolism, the origin of protein synthesis and genetic information as well as the escape into the wild of the first free-living cells: Bacteria and Archaea
Contents
Chapter 1 The Early Earth Setting and Chemical Fundamentals
Chapter 2 Origin of Organic Molecules
Chapter 3 Primordial Reaction Networks and Energy Metabolism
Chapter 4 Prebiotic Synthesis of Monomers and Polymers
Chapter 5 Template Directed Synthesis of Polymers
Chapter 6 Innovations on the path to cellularity
Chapter 7 Harnessing energy for escape as free-living cells
Appendix
References for further reading
Solutions to problems
Index
