“Origin of Life on Earth: A Biological Overview” by Vandana Chaudhary

Life only occurs on planet Earth. Living organism range from invisible bacteria to
big, tall elephants and trees. All living organisms have cell organization, structure,
metabolism and they have the tendency to grow, reproduce and die which non livings do
not possess. How the life emerged on earth from the non living conditions in past? How
this planet became habitable for innumerable living beings as we see it today? Though no
one is ever likely to know the whole story, virtually everyone has wondered at one time
or another, how life on Earth began.
By looking around us we can infer the importance of life which is gifted to only our
planet Earth in the whole universe. The living organisms include plant and animals that
are studied under the branch of science Biology which give us immense information
about life and origin of life on this planet.
When the earth formed some 4.6 billion years ago, it was a lifeless, inhospitable place
without free oxygen, the life supporting element in its atmosphere and it had a reducing
atmosphere. A billion years later it was teeming with organisms resembling blue-green
algae. How did they get there? How, in short, did life begin? This long-standing question
continues to generate fascinating conjectures and ingenious experiments.
Life originated in the oceans of the primitive earth about 3.6 million years ago and
that too, spontaneously from non living matter, organic or biochemical compounds .This
is termed as abiogenesis i.e. origin of life from non living matter, which was put forward
by the scientist A.I Oparin. The reducing atmosphere of the new born Earth had
Ammonia, Methane, water vapors and salts which dissolved in water and made the
oceans hot boiling soups or Broth like as proposed by Haldane.
The relatively simpler substances like Ammonia, Methane, water vapors and salts in
the oceans combined to form increasingly complex molecules including the genetic
material ,self duplicating RNA(Ribonucleic Acid) ,DNA (Deoxy ribonucleic Acid) and
Proteins. The advent of self-replicating RNA and DNA was a critical milestone on the
road to life. Experiments conducted under conditions intended to resemble those present
on primitive Earth have resulted in the production of some of the chemical components of
proteins, DNA, and RNA. Miller and Urey (1953) recreated the conditions of primitive
Earth in laboratory and abiotically synthesized amino acids and bases to prove
abiogenesis or life origin by chemical processes involving non biological components.
The DNA and RNA like molecules were then enclosed in membranes derived from lipid
and proteins and first ‘cell like structures’ were formed which changed the face of
evolution of life on our planet.
The first organisms to inhabit Earth were anaerobes that depended on organic
molecules in the broth for obtaining energy as molecular oxygen was absent. These early
organisms must have been simpler than the organisms living today. Furthermore, before
the earliest organisms, there must have been structures that one would not call "alive" but
that are now components of living things.
Evolutionary scientists believe that the next organisms to inhabit Earth were
chemoautotrophs that lived in volcanic iron and sulphur environments and obtained their
energy by degrading chemical compounds for synthesis of food molecules. Chemotrophs
underwent some important changes to form aerobic bacteria, which gave rise to
mitochondria and chloroplast to finally form present day animals and plants respectively.