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How did life on Earth originate? Undersea microbes inspire a new theory

earth9How did life originate on Earth? Here is another fundamental new theory that can provide an answer to it. There is an obscure undersea microbe that metabolizes carbon monoxide into methane and vinegar. Setting out to show it, two laboratories at Penn State discovered not merely what previously was an unknown biochemical process, but the findings also inspires anther thought on the life’s origin on Earth. It may also challenge the prevailing theories.

The results of this finding also throw light into the microbial production of methane’s evolution — methane being the primary component of natural gas.

James G. Ferry, Stanley Person Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology said,

We’ve taken a new approach to thinking about the evolution of life from a thermodynamic perspective… It reshapes the two previous theories of life’s origin, it shows how they overlap, and it extends both of them significantly… The apparently irreconcilable “heterotrophic” and “chemoautotrophic” theories of the origin of life both focus on the processes by which chemical building blocks first appeared for primitive life to assemble into complex molecules… But that’s not really what the driving force was in early evolution… Nobody had properly considered thermodynamics.

Via: Physorg
http://www.physorg.com/news66660325.html

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