Lecture 1- In the beginning

What is life?

 Growth
 Reproduction (offspring)
 Heredity (genetics/DNA)
 Homeostasis (maintaining internal
environment
 Metabolic activity
 Cellular structures
 Respond (in most cases they should be able to respond/react to the environment

Geological Clock-

 Shows history of earth

Tree of life-
  These are all the species
 All have one common ancestor
o LUCA
 Last Universal Common Ancestor
 You can see how closely related the organisms are to eachother
 Apart from plant, fungi and animals, they are all microbes

Carl Linnaeus-
 Organised all the living forms
 Invented the latin names for the species
 Homo-genus
 He catalogued all his life forms in his book and described them
 Picked one species and depending on their features he grouped them
o Based them on their morphology

Taxonomy-

 Organisms groups by similarity

 Linnaeus – Plants and Animals
 Most recent systems 3 domains and 7 kingdoms
 Domains: Bacteria, Archaea, Eucarya
(n.b. NOT prokaryotes)

Kingdoms: Bacteria-Archaea-Protista/Protozoa-Chromista-Plantae-Fungi-
Animalia
 (but this could change…)
Prokaryotes-
 They are unicellular
 Cell wall in generally present
 Nucleus is absent, instead, they possess a
nucleoid region in the cell
 DNA is circular

Eukaryotes-
 Could be either unicellular or multicellular
 Cell wall can be present or absent
 Nucleus is always present
 DNA is linear

What Linnaeus failed to see-

 There are microbes
 No concept over time
 Did not realise things change over time
 Charles Darwin
o Came up w time applying to species
o Did not publish it
 Alfred Russel Wallace
 Came up with LUCA and so did Darwin

What did LUCA look like-

  DNA- to
have genes to inherit
  Central Dogma: DNA makes RNA makes PROTEIN

Central Dogma-

 DNA: chain of nucleotides formed into double helix

 Codons: combinations of 3 nucleotides code for 20 amino acids
 RNA: single strand; acts as a “translator” of the DNA code
 Protein: chain of amino acids
 What came first? DNA, RNA or PROTEIN?
o RNA

RNA world-

Ribosomes-
The second law of thermodynamics-
 The total entropy of an isolated system can only increase over time. (Wikipedia)
 All systems tend from a state of order to a state of disorder
 Things tend to fall apart
 Life is a highly ordered process. How can life maintain and reproduce itself?
o ENERGY

Summary
• To be alive, you must be able to capture resources from the environment, grow and
reproduce yourself
• Life first emerged ~4000 million years ago
• Early life may have been based on RNA, with DNA and protein evolving later
• All life present today evolved from the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA)
• LUCA had DNA, RNA, proteins, a cell membrane and systems for capturing energy
• Taxonomy attempts to classify organisms based on similarities
• Phylogenetics attempts to describe the relationships between organisms
• The domains of life are archaea, bacteria and eucarya (eukaryotes)
• Eukaryotes can be divided into 5 kingdoms: Protozoa, Chromista, Plants, Fungi and Animals
• All organisms require a source of energy to allow them to grow and reproduce