History of Life itself- from molecules to..

Having a cell is very fundamental to life and that was possible only by the creation of cell membrane. Probably, for the first time in the history of evolution, something is distinguished from the primordial soup of chemicals with the creation of cell membrane.

How did the cell membrane come into existence?

I will try to convey the gist of this without being too much technical. Water is usually attracted to polar molecules and they can get easily mixed up in water. If u have a molecule of carbons and hydrogen, which is non-polar (like say oil, Hydrophobic), It doesn’t get mixed up. If u have a hydroxyl (OH, alcohol) group which is polar(Hydrophilic), then it easily gets dissolved in water. Suppose, if u have a large molecule which is partly hydrophobic and partly hydrophilic placed in water, then you can imagine forming a sphere like structure with hydrophilic parts at the boundaries and hydrophobic parts lurking inside. This possibility of the sphere-like structure is the genesis of the cell membrane.

Protein(made of Amino acids(20 types)) folding problem:

Enzymes are a type of proteins – They lower the activation barrier, stabilize the transition state, speeds up the reaction.


Leave a Reply


WordPress.com Logo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Google+ photo


Connecting to %s