CHAPTER 26-28.docVIP

CHAPTER 26-28 31 REVIEW CHAPTER 26 The primitive atmosphere of Earth may have favored the synthesis of organic molecules because It was highly oxidative. It was reducing and had energy sources in the form of lightning and UV radiation. It had a great deal of methane and organic fuels. It had plenty of water vapor, carbon, and nitrogen, providing the C, H, O and N needed for organic molecules. It had no oxygen. Life on Earth is thought to have begun 540 million years ago at the beginning of the Paleozoic era. 700 million years ago during the Precambrian era. 2.5 billion years ago when oxygen accumulated in the atmosphere. between 3.5 and 4.0 billion years ago. 4.6 billion years ago when the Earth formed. Stromatolites are synthetic molecules consisting of amino adenosine and ester that are able to self-replicate. a type of protobiont that forms when lipids assemble into a bilayer surrounding organic molecules. members of the kingdom Protista that are mobile and photosynthetic. fossils appearing to be prokaryotes that are the size of bacteria. banded domes of sediment that contain the earliest fossils. Coacervates are droplets of molecules covered with a selectively permeable lipid membrane. droplets that self-assemble when polypeptides, nucleic acids and polysaccharides are mixed. polypeptides formed in the laboratory by dripping organic monomers onto hot rocks. organic monomers associated with clay crystals. RNA self-replicating molecules. A proposed hypothesis for the origin of genetic information is that Early DNA molecules coded for RNA, which then catalyzed the production of proteins. Early polypeptides became associated with RNA bases, and a catalyst linked the bases into RNA molecules. Short RNA strands were capable of self-replication and evolved by the natural selection of molecules that were most stable and autocatalytic. As protobionts grew and split, they distributed copies of their molecules to their offspring. Early RNA molecules coded for DN