BIOL 2604 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Banded Iron Formation, Auxotrophy, Aquifex
Document Summary
Earth pretty damn old, 4. 6 billion years (or gy) Sedimentary rocks = 3. 5gy (liquid water to make sediment, so we can guess there is water for life) Fossilized stromatolites identified rocks that are up to 3. 5gy. Carbon dating compare heavy carbon to light carbon. In living cells, carbon 12 usually fixed to 13. The ratio of things with some light carbon with older things that have more heavy carbon can show the date of their existence. Miller and uri mixed molecules that they figured were around give it energy source [electrical] in place of solar, geothermal, electrical discharge, radionuclide decay. Early microbes probs were thermophillic, and ran on rna. Ribozymes are catalytic rna molecules that work like enzymes but are not proteins. Do self replication, nucleotide synthesis, and amino acid polymerization. Specificity of protein enzymes is greater and may have eventually replaced rna as main catalysts.
