Proton Gradients Are Important in Biology

The vents are made of limestone and have alkaline fluids rich in hydrogen coming into what would have been an acidic ocean. So more or less everything which you require for cells today is there from the very beginning. It's a very strange ATP. Is it ATP? Yeah, they make ATP. That's right. This is something that really came as a shock. 50 years ago this year, Peter Mitchell won the Nobel Prize in 1978,. came up with this idea called chemiosmosis - stripping electrons from food before passing them to oxygen.