This lecture What is life?

Outline: What is life? What is alien life? Is there life unlike Earth-life? DNA and its actions What is it about DNA that aids evolution? What could non-DNA life be like? How could DNA life be formed from inorganic sources? Where on the Early Earth might this have happened?

Thought Question
Is a denition of life necessary? Who needs one? NASA does! Does Craig Venter?

What do you need for life?

A membrane Metabolic machinery A chemistry set An information system A method of reproduction

The reverse what is death?

When metabolism ceases with no prospect of restarting:- Brig Klyce (Metabolism: processes that convert materials and energy for lifes needs metabolism creates waste products (energy and chemicals)

From Koshland reading: Seven pillars (essential principles) of life

1. Program: organized plan that describes ingredients and their kinetics (workings) 2. Improvisation life cannot control all of its surroundings must be able to change its program (evolution) 3. Compartmentalization limit volume, keep some chemicals in, some out 4. Energy you need it!

5. Regeneration a metabolizing system is composed of catalysts (enzymes) and chemicals things have to be replaced and rebuilt 6. Adaptability fast behavioral response as contrasted to show evolution (improvisation above) 7. Seclusion chemical systems isolated

Paul Davies
Life metabolizes, Life has complexity and organization Life develops, reproduces, evolves Life is autonomous

From Schrodinger:
Living matter evades the decay to equilibrium, and life feeds on negative entropy. Life does this through metabolism, overtly by eating, drinking, breathing, or the exchange of material, which forms the root of the word from its original Greek denition.

Lynn Margulis
All life is cellular. Therefore a virus is not alive. Life is matter that chooses Every cell on Earth uses the same operating system: DNA makes RNA makes proteins

Evolutionists [Darwinists] definitions of life (a few)

Life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution (Joyce, 1994) Life is a self-replicating, evolving system based on organic chemistry (Pace, 2002) System capable of evolution by natural selection (Sagan, 1970) Material system that undergoes Darwinian evolution (C. McKay) The minimal living system must be self-duplicating and mutable, and it must have the capacity for hetero-catalysis for bringing about chemical changes in the environment that support the self-duplication function (Hartman)

Summary - what is life - the NASA version

Life reproduces or replicates Life metabolizes Life evolves

Is a virus alive?
Metabolism? Evolution? Reproduction? Other properties?

The Evolution of the rst Earth Life

One of Darwins tenets was that all life came from a single source - there was some rst living cell.

Characteristics of Earth Life

1. Water is essential for active life 2. It is contained in a microenvironment (cell) 3. It is carbon based
a. Nucleic acids consisting of 4 nucleotides b. Dual nucleic acid system: RNA and DNA c. Proteins: 20 amino acids d. Lipids with straight chains of methyl branched chains e. Metabolic energetics use phosphate anhydrides, thioesters f. Metabolism uses nucleophile-electrophile reactions with C=O

4. It replicates 5. It evolves (mutation and other mechanisms for acquiring genetic material, and natural selection

How can our kind of life be dened?

Uses DNA A specic genetic code Only twenty (and the same twenty) amino acids Always cellular? NO! (PW) Is a virus alive, or is it even Life as we know it? - not cellular, some without DNA

DNA- one way, or the only way to store information necessary for life?
DNA is hugely complex How was it rst synthesized?

DNA
DNA is a double helix. A bonds to T: C bonds to G In man, the DNA molecule , if fully extended, would have a total length of 1.7 metres. If you unwrap all the DNA you have in all your cells, you could reach the moon ...6000 times!

DNA Replication
DNA is opened by enzymes (unzips) Complementary nucleotides bond with the old strands 2 strands created: is the old strand; is the new strand.

DNA
Is our form of DNA the rst out of the gate, or the best out of the gate - was there survival of the ttest among early DNA molecules? How did we arrive at a unied genetic code on Earth? - John Baross, UW, suspects that viruses were the agent that unied a diverse zoo

tRNA translates mRNA into proteins

DNA TRANSLATION

DNA TRANSCRIPTION
DNA- GIVES CODE TO mRNA

SUMMARY

Comparison of DNA and RNA

RNA is single stranded RNA has uracil instead of thymine A-U DNA is double stranded DNA has thymine instead of uracil A-T

Origin of Life on Earth

When? Where? How? How else could this process have occurred on Earth and what else might have resulted?

Borate Minerals Stabilize Ribose

A. Ricardo, M. A. Carrigan, A. N. Olcott, S. A. Benner, Science 302:1931, 2004.

So where did life begin on Earth (if it began on Earth)

Some warm little pond- Darwin Hydrothermal vents Bubbles in tide pools/intertidal In clouds Brine ponds Coupled impact craters! (?)

Why impact craters?

Making RNA the hardest step. Ribose sugars unstable at high temperatures. Ribose can be made by serial evaporations and decanting of borate mineral reactions with water Need a desert to do this - and much chemical glassware - or impact craters in a desert

Primordial soup or primordial zoo?

Much nonsense about low diversity of early life. Probably there was a zoo of different membrane types, and different genetic systems within them

RNA life
Self catalyzing. RNA serves as information system, and enzyme to catalyze self reproduction. Does it also need a membrane, or could there have been naked RNA? How did DNA take over?

Varieties of alien life

Change nature of information storage molecule Change solvent within cell- ammonia instead of water Is there Life as we do not know it presently on Earth - and how would we know?

Water vs. Not Water. The boundary between conventional weird and truly weird In water at 5 < pH < 9, DNA still has a protonation state that permits Watson-Crick pairing Within this range, alternative nucleotides, alternative amino acids in the encoded protein, alternative lipid-forming components, alternative metabolisms, all established as functional. Above and below this range, alternative nucleic acid structures can manage.

Some Weird (compared to Earth life ) life

Life that does not require carbon Life that does not require selected elements other than carbon,nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur (RNA world), Life that does not require certain metals such as Mg, Na, K, Life that works without Darwinian evolution. (The reason whyDarwinian is included in so many denitions of life is because we believe that it is the only mechanism available)

Life without matter?????? (naaa)

Surely life requires a boundary to satisfy thermodynamic requirements, and such a boundary needs to be anchored to matter.