Mitochondria - The Creb Cycle

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Bacteria have their own creb cycle. It's effectively burning hydrogen in oxygen to generate energy. But if you put this bacteria in in a deep sea hydrothermal vent, then everything goes in the opposite direction. And it's actually taking hydrogen and c o two and making organic molecules. So we've got all this spontaneous chemistry going on which is going to depend really on the environment that it's in. We started out four billion years ago with no oxygen in the atmosphere,. and ends up some time around the cambrian explosion when oxygen levels were approaching modern levels.

The origin of life here on Earth was an important and fascinating event, but it was also a long time ago and hasn’t left many pieces of direct evidence concerning what actually happened. One set of clues we have comes from processes in current living organisms, especially those processes that seem extremely common. The Krebs cycle, the sequence of reactions that functions as a pathway for energy distribution in aerobic organisms, is such an example. I talk with biochemist about the importance of the Krebs cycle to contemporary biology, as well as its possible significance in understanding the origin of life.

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Nick Lane received his PhD from the Royal Free Hospital Medical School. He is currently a professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry at University College London. He was a founding member of the UCL Consortium for Mitochondrial Research, and is Co-Director of the UCL Centre for Life’s Origin and Evolution. He was awarded the 2009 UCL Provost’s Venture Research Prize, the 2011 BMC Research Award for Genetics, Genomics, Bioinformatics and Evolution, the 2015 Biochemical Society Award, and the 2016 Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture. His new book is Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death.

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