How Molecular Forces and Rotating Planets Create Life by Jan Spitzer;

Author:Jan Spitzer;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Origin of life; reductionism; Darwinian evolution; Earth-Moon rotations; magma Earth; solar energy; seawater; wet-dry cycles; tidal sediments; cycling disequilibria; biofilms; the RNA World; Schrödinger; biological complexity; Pauling; Delbrück; non-covalent forces; hydrogen bonding; excluded volume; electrostatic forces; membranes; proteins; nucleoid; phosphates; biomacromolecular crowding; quinary structure; sol-gel transitions; coevolution; vectorial biochemistry; ionic semi-conductivity; becoming alive; proto-cells; heredity; LUCA; prokaryotes; horizontal gene transfer; evolutionary saltations; cell fusions; cell cycle; the tree of life
Publisher: MIT Press

Figure 5.3

The transient structure of bacterial cytogel. A hypothetical kinase phosphorylates a hydroxy-amino acid of a target protein, which turns its function ON in conjunction with hydrophobic forces represented generically by [–CH2]p+q. The target protein changes conformation, and at the same time, it opens a new “microfluidic” channel that delivers ADP toward ATP synthase in the membrane while redistributing potassium ions. The new channel becomes gated by strong negative potential, allowing only cations or neutral metabolites to enter the channel. Phosphatase can reverse the action and close the channel. The model suggests that the cell counts its anions and cations one by one to be close to electroneutrality (i.e., operating digitally), as only small charge excesses in different parts of the cell are needed to create large differences in electrochemical potentials. It can be imagined that proteins and nucleic acids are immobilized transiently in gelled quinary superclusters with complex electrolytic behavior, which represents “calculations” by ionic flows controlled by biochemical reactions that add and remove molecular tags to proteins and nucleic acids. The gelled transient quinary structures, hydrated between one and 10 water layers, define the state of being alive. These structures fall apart after cellular death.

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