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"You gotta have skin"
Natural History, Feb, 2004 by Stephan Reebs
For life to develop on Earth, two components had to get together: chains of nucleic acids (RNA), and membranes that could form a protective cell boundary around the nucleic acids. There needed to be a kind of skin--"the thing that if you've got it outside," as the songwriter Allan Sherman once put it, "it helps keep your insides in." Problem was, no one had identified a situation in which both the genetic material and the would-be cell membranes were likely to form spontaneously at the same time. But now experiments by Martin M. Hanczyc, Shelly M. Fujikawa, and Jack W. Szostak, all molecular biologists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Boston, suggest that the right conditions are present in simple minerals.
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The three investigators found that a porous clay called montmorillonite, already known to encourage the linking of nucleic acids, also has an effect on fatty acids, the building blocks of cell membranes. When fatty acids meet up with particles of the clay, they rapidly form vesicles--bubblelike "skins"--that can encapsulate the nucleic acids. Made up of a double layer of fatty acids, the vesicles have the same kind of structure as the membranes of living cells. Moreover, when more fatty acids are slowly added to the system, the vesicles grow. They even divide by budding.
The study shows that the first cells on Earth could have arisen as a result of simple chemical processes, even in the absence of enzymes or other substances previously thought essential to early life. ("Experimental models of primitive cellular compartments: Encapsulation, growth, and division," Science 302:618-22, October 24, 2003)
COPYRIGHT 2004 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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Most Popular Articles in Reference
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