BIOL240 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Harold Urey, Stanley Miller, Hydrogen Sulfide
Document Summary
General biology 1 (101-nya) lecture notes (lecture 13: a. i. oparin and j. B. s. haldane hypothesized that the early atmosphere was a reducing environment which favors. Abiotic synthesis of macromolecules: small organic molecules polymerize when they are concentrated on hot sand, clay, or rock. Experiments demonstrate that protocells could have formed spontaneously from abiotically produced organic compounds: for example, small membrane-bounded droplets called vesicles can form when lipids or other organic molecules are added to water - see slide #3, 4. This is enhanced by the addition of soft clay; which may contain macromolecules. They can grow and bud off new vesicles. Self-replicating rna and the dawn of natural selection: the first genetic material was probably rna, not dna, rna molecules called ribozymes have been found to catalyze many different reactions. For example - ribozymes can make complementary copies of short stretches of their own sequence or other short pieces of rna.