First life: Discovering the Connections between stars, cells, and how life began

First Life: Discovering the Connections between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began

Volumn , Issue , 2011, Pages

  Deamer, David ^a  

^a University of California Santa Cruz   (United States)

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EID: 84861643201     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
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References (48)

1. http://astrobiology.nasa.gov/
2. http://www.astrochem.org/
3. http://www.esa.int/
4. For artists' versions of what was discussed in this chapter, see the websites of William Hartmann (http://www.psi.edu/hartmann/painting.html) and Don Dixon (http:// cosmographica.com/gallery).
5. Readers can learn more about stellar nucleosynthesis at a website hosted by Glen Elert called The Physics Hypertextbook (http://physics.info/nucleosynthesis), which clearly describes how biogenic elements are synthesized in stars.
6. For a scientific account of meteorites, Cambridge University Press published Meteorites: A Petrologic, Chemical and Isotopic Synthesis by Robert Hutchison (2007). On the Scientific American website, you find a recent podcast called "Murchison Meteorite's Chemical Bonanza" (http://www.scientificamerican.com).
7. A website sponsored by the Harvard University Department of Astronomy (http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/COMPLETE/learn/star_and_planet_formation.html) describes how solar systems are produced in interstellar molecular clouds. Several links to animations of this process are also given.
8. Brig Klyce has an interesting website called Cosmic Ancestry that presents arguments in favor of panspermia to explain the beginning of life on Earth (http://www.panspermia .org/index.htm). The ideas of Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe are discussed in some detail there.
9. "Self-Assembly Processes in the Prebiotic Environment," the scientific report we wrote about our research in Kamchatka was published in 2006 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
10. A nice introduction to hydrothermal vents is found on the website Dive and Discover, sponsored by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (http://www.divediscover.whoi.edu/vents/index.html) The website Meteor Crater (http://www.meteorcrater.com) is sponsored by the company that runs tours into the crater. It is very informative and includes an impressive video presentation of what the impact looked like when a huge iron meteorite struck the Arizona desert 50,000 years ago.
11. The book Planets and Life edited by W. T Sullivan and J. A. Baross (2007) provides a broad introduction to the new field of astrobiology. Chapter 12, written by Roger Buick, discusses bacterial microfossils and offers a thoughtful overview of how they are formed and how much confidence we can have that they are real.
12. Chemistry and biochemistry are particularly well-served by Internet sites. Simply typing a chemical name into your browser will usually take you directly to a source, often Wikipedia, that contains basic information.
13. The Exploring Space section of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) website (http://www .pbs.org/exploringspace/meteorites/murchison/index.html) has a nice introduction to meteorites and the origin of life, including a discussion of how the chirality of amino acids could have played a role in initiating homochirality.
14. Anne Marie Helmenstine hosts a searchable website About.com: Chemistry (http:// chemistry.about.com) that presents fundamental chemical concepts at an introductory level. A search for "chirality" will provide further details about the chiral nature of amino acids and other biomolecules.
15. The Department of Energy has an excellent introduction to concepts of energy on its website (http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids). Although it's called EnergyKids, it is an award-winning website that anyone can learn from.
16. Franklin Harold spent his scientific career investigating how simple forms of life use energy. Frank wrote a nontechnical book called The Vital Force: A Study of Bioenergetics (1986). Although the book was written more than 20 years ago, it remains one of the most readable and lucid introductions to the role of energy in life processes.
17. With coauthor Art Weber, I wrote a chapter of the book Origins of Life (2010) that discusses the kinds of energy available to drive chemical reactions leading to the origin of life. The chapter is available in the 2010 archives of the Cold Spring Harbor Press website (http://cshperspectives.cshlp.org).
18. Quite a few video animations of electron transport and ATP synthesis have been posted on the YouTube website (www.youtube.com) and can be found by using those words as search terms. One that I enjoy watching and that I often use in class is called "grt video of atp synthase."
19. An excellent website describing fundamental aspects of self-assembly processes is hosted by the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin- Madison (http://mrsec.wisc.edu/Edetc/nanoquest/self_assembly/index.html). The website includes several videos illustrating self-assembly processes.
20. The First Cell Membranes, a review summarizing my research on encapsulation and the origin of cellular life, was published in Astrobiology in 2002. A pdf file can be downloaded from the website hosted by the Astrophysics & Astrochemistry Laboratory at NASA Ames Research Center (http://www.astrochem.org/PDF/Deameretal2003.pdf ).
21. The Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington, hosts an informative website that introduces basic aspects of this emerging discipline (http://www.systemsbiology.org/Intro_ to_ISB_and_Systems_Biology).
22. In addition to his interest in bioenergetics, Franklin Harold was among the first to recognize that life is best understood as a system of interacting molecules. Harold put his ideas together in his book The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms, and the Order of Life (2001).
23. Understanding Evolution is a website sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley (http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/home.php). The language is intended for nonscientist readers, but the information content is excellent. One of the links, From soup to cells- the origin of life, gives a nutshell description of the topics covered in this book.
24. The ideas and concepts in Chapter 14 are presented in earlier chapters of the book.
25. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has pioneered the use of Internet videos as an educational medium. One such video is a nice lecture by Drew Endy, whose research specialty is synthetic biology. Readers can watch the lecture at MIT's website (http://mitworld .mit.edu/video/363).
26. Another very nice program about synthetic life can be viewed at the PBS website (http:// www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3214/01.html). Hosted by Robert Krulwich, the program features the research of several scientists, including some described in this book.
27. The Molecular Origins of Life: Assembling Pieces of the Puzzle, edited by André Brack (1998)
28. Genetic Takeover and the Mineral Origins of Life, by Graham Cairns-Smith (1982)
29. Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story, by Graham Cairns-Smith (2000)
30. First Steps in the Origin of Life in the Universe, edited by Julián Chela-Flores, Tobias Owen and Francois Raulin (2001)
31. The Origin of Life, by Paul Davies (2006)
32. Genesis on Planet Earth: Search for Life's Beginning, by William Day (1984)
33. Blueprint for a Cell: The Nature and Origin of Life, by Christian DeDuve (1991)
34. Origins of Life, by Freeman Dyson (1999)
35. The Origin of Life: A Warm Little Pond, by Clair Edwin Folsome (1979)
36. Emergence of Life on Earth: A Historical and Scientific Overview, by Iris Fry (2000)
37. Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins, by Robert Hazen (2005)
38. Biogenesis: Theories of Life's Origins, by Noam Lahav (1999)
39. The Origin and Early Evolution of Life: Prebiotic Chemistry, the Pre-RNA World, and Time, by Antonio Lazcano and Stanley Miller (1996)
40. The Emergence of Life: From Chemical Origins to Synthetic Biology, by Pier Luigi Luisi (2010)
41. The Origins of Life on the Earth, by Stanley Miller and Leslie Orgel (1974)
42. Beginnings of Cellular Life: Metabolism Recapitulates Biogenesis, by Harold Morowitz (2004)
43. Origin of Life, by Aleksandr Oparin (1938)
44. Between Necessity and Probability: Searching for the Definition and Origin of Life, by Radu Popa (2004)
45. Planetary Systems and the Origins of Life, edited by Ralph Pudritz, Paul Higgs, and Jonathon Stone (2007)
46. Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life, by Horst Rauchfuss (2008)
47. Life's Origin: The Beginnings of Biological Evolution, by J. William Schopf (2002)
48. Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth, by Robert Shapiro (1986)