The Origin And Evolution Of Cells - The Cell - NCBI Bookshelf

The First Cell

It appears that life first emerged at least 3.8 billion years ago, approximately 750 million years after Earth was formed (Figure 1.1). How life originated and how the first cell came into being are matters of speculation, since these events cannot be reproduced in the laboratory. Nonetheless, several types of experiments provide important evidence bearing on some steps of the process.

Figure 1.1

Time scale of evolution. The scale indicates the approximate times at which some of the major events in the evolution of cells are thought to have occurred.

It was first suggested in the 1920s that simple organic molecules could form and spontaneously polymerize into macromolecules under the conditions thought to exist in primitive Earth's atmosphere. At the time life arose, the atmosphere of Earth is thought to have contained little or no free oxygen, instead consisting principally of CO2 and N2 in addition to smaller amounts of gases such as H2, H2S, and CO. Such an atmosphere provides reducing conditions in which organic molecules, given a source of energy such as sunlight or electrical discharge, can form spontaneously. The spontaneous formation of organic molecules was first demonstrated experimentally in the 1950s, when Stanley Miller (then a graduate student) showed that the discharge of electric sparks into a mixture of H2, CH4, and NH3, in the presence of water, led to the formation of a variety of organic molecules, including several amino acids (Figure 1.2). Although Miller's experiments did not precisely reproduce the conditions of primitive Earth, they clearly demonstrated the plausibility of the spontaneous synthesis of organic molecules, providing the basic materials from which the first living organisms arose.

Figure 1.2

Spontaneous formation of organic molecules. Water vapor was refluxed through an atmosphere consisting of CH4, NH3, and H2, into which electric sparks were discharged. Analysis of the reaction products revealed the formation of a variety of organic molecules, (more...)

The next step in evolution was the formation of macromolecules. The monomeric building blocks of macromolecules have been demonstrated to polymerize spontaneously under plausible prebiotic conditions. Heating dry mixtures of amino acids, for example, results in their polymerization to form polypeptides. But the critical characteristic of the macromolecule from which life evolved must have been the ability to replicate itself. Only a macromolecule capable of directing the synthesis of new copies of itself would have been capable of reproduction and further evolution.

Of the two major classes of informational macromolecules in present-day cells (nucleic acids and proteins), only the nucleic acids are capable of directing their own self-replication. Nucleic acids can serve as templates for their own synthesis as a result of specific base pairing between complementary nucleotides (Figure 1.3). A critical step in understanding molecular evolution was thus reached in the early 1980s, when it was discovered in the laboratories of Sid Altman and Tom Cech that RNA is capable of catalyzing a number of chemical reactions, including the polymerization of nucleotides. RNA is thus uniquely able both to serve as a template for and to catalyze its own replication. Consequently, RNA is generally believed to have been the initial genetic system, and an early stage of chemical evolution is thought to have been based on self-replicating RNA molecules—a period of evolution known as the RNA world. Ordered interactions between RNA and amino acids then evolved into the present-day genetic code, and DNA eventually replaced RNA as the genetic material.

Figure 1.3

Self-replication of RNA. Complementary pairing between nucleotides (adenine [A] with uracil [U] and guanine [G] with cytosine [C]) allows one strand of RNA to serve as a template for the synthesis of a new strand with the complementary sequence.

The first cell is presumed to have arisen by the enclosure of self-replicating RNA in a membrane composed of phospholipids (Figure 1.4). As discussed in detail in the next chapter, phospholipids are the basic components of all present-day biological membranes, including the plasma membranes of both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. The key characteristic of the phospholipids that form membranes is that they are amphipathic molecules, meaning that one portion of the molecule is soluble in water and another portion is not. Phospholipids have long, water-insoluble (hydrophobic) hydrocarbon chains joined to water-soluble (hydrophilic) head groups that contain phosphate. When placed in water, phospholipids spontaneously aggregate into a bilayer with their phosphate-containing head groups on the outside in contact with water and their hydrocarbon tails in the interior in contact with each other. Such a phospholipid bilayer forms a stable barrier between two aqueous compartments—for example, separating the interior of the cell from its external environment.

Figure 1.4

Enclosure of self-replicating RNA in a phospholipid membrane. The first cell is thought to have arisen by the enclosure of self-replicating RNA and associated molecules in a membrane composed of phospholipids. Each phospholipid molecule has two long hydrophobic (more...)

The enclosure of self-replicating RNA and associated molecules in a phospholipid membrane would thus have maintained them as a unit, capable of self-reproduction and further evolution. RNA-directed protein synthesis may already have evolved by this time, in which case the first cell would have consisted of self-replicating RNA and its encoded proteins.