Nick Lane

The endosymbiosis that resulted in the harnessing of mitochondrial energy production appears to have only happened once (see work by Nick Lane) and resulted in a ~20 fold increase in available energy to the cell was followed very closely by the Cambrian explosion. We could still all still be bacteria today without it. https://nick-lane.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Lane-J-Theoret-Biol-M…

We may never be able to answer definitively, but another theory is that the evolution of life is a series of steps, some with highly probable pathways (lipids with hydrophobic tails forming enclosed boundaries) and some extraordinarily improbable (formation of eukaryotic cells, incorporation of mitochondria). The book The Vital Question by biochemist Nick Lane goes into this in great depth. https://nick-lane.net/books/the-vital-question-why-is-life-the-way-it-… He estimated that simple, single celled prokaryotic organisms should be pretty common when the right conditions and probably happened multiple times independently on Earth, but eukaryotic mitochondrial cells may have only happened one single time and all complex life is descended from that one cell. I believe that was covered in https://lexfridman.com/nick-lane/) that

If this is exciting to you, I’d recommend “Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life” by Nick Lane [0]. It’s a fascinating and captivating (albeit dense) exploration into the concept that mitochondria were central to the success of eukaryotic life. I read it in a book club during my PhD. [0] https://nick-lane.net/books/power-sex-suicide-mitochondria-meaning-lif…

He provides download links to most his papers on his website: https://nick-lane.net/publications/ As for a good introduction to what his(and the many other people working in his lab) research is getting at, I really recommend the podcast episode he did on Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast.

A couple of Nick Lane's books have led me to conclude (with the same limit of a single data point that everyone else has) that a) life origins, based on energy gradients, probably started similarly everywhere, and b) mitochondria is probably one of the great filters. I realise it's all hypothetical - extrapolating from a sole sample is a fool's errand - but the logic laid out in those two works is compelling. [0] https://nick-lane.net/books/the-vital-question-why-is-life-the-way-it-… [1] https://nick-lane.net/books/power-sex-suicide-mitochondria-meaning-lif…

I'm more partial to the idea that a metabolic system to harness energy had to develop before replication and that life started in alkaline hydrothermal vents rather than ponds due to the delivery of energy and concentration of chemicals. Really enjoyed Nick Lane's writing on this topic, highly recommend his books. https://nick-lane.net/publications/origin-life-alkaline-hydrothermal-v…

Yes to Nick Lane and "The Vital Question". However, as excellent as Laine is at explaining, after the first 100 pages or so, the book gets quite technical (necessarily so). Unless your biochemistry is reasonably good, it is suggested (by biochemists themselves[1]) to first read his other book, 'Life Ascending'[2], which lays out the ground work for the deep dive into "hydrothermal vents", a key topic in 'The Vital Question'. [1] As shared here on HN before: When I was reading the book on a plane, a seasoned biologist happened to be sitting next to me. When I said that it's the first book of Nick Lane that I picked up, he said: "I'd rather suggest you to pick up Laine's other book, Life Ascending, and then get back to The Vital Question." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18714115 [2] http://nick-lane.net/books/life-ascending-the-ten-great-inventions-of-…

Mitochondria are fascinating, and it seems probably very very old too! Nick Lane (http://www.nick-lane.net/) writes a lot about the subject in; https://www.amazon.co.uk/Power-Sex-Suicide-Mitochondria-meaning/dp/019… https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vital-Question-Why-life-way/dp/1781250367

I have read The Vital Question, after hearing about it from BillG's blog. And it did blew me away. I immediately read also Oxygen, by same author, and I found it equally interesting (it goes in more detail on some topics, but some of the ideas in Oxygen are superseded by his later books). If you can spare an hour, I recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGxAB4Weq0U . Is made by the author and it covers the ideas of life origin exposed in The Vital Question. Also interesting his paper on the double-agent theory of aging: http://www.nick-lane.net/double-agent%20theory.pdf

You might want to read some of Nick Lanes work, he's a biochemist researching abiogenesis etc but has written a number of popular works, which I found very compelling https://nick-lane.net/ He is in particular concerned with exactly the chemistry and physics aspect of the origin of life. In particular his summary of the theory of alkaline "warm" hydrothermal chemistry & the early earth and the origin of life is very compelling. Essentially such areas are theorized to have created physical protocells at the chemical and energy boundaries between the sea water and the alkaline hydrothermal vents. The naturally occurring molecules there apparently present aspects similar to a hypothetical early cell, and yes, bags of saline. But also the relevant point is the interaction of energy across this barrier. And eventually something "escaped" from this system that was able to "create" a similar system or sustain itself in other environments. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2019/nov/deep-sea-vents-had-ideal-condition…

If you like Mitochondria stuff, This book about the Krebs cycle and how it was discovered is pretty good: https://nick-lane.net/books/transformer-the-deep-chemistry-of-life-and… The short answer is: First you have to murder a pigeon to extract fresh breast muscle cells. Then you put those cells in a manometer which uses columns of water to measure respiration via tiny changes in gas volume. From there you can add various things like citric acid and see how that affects respiration. So figuring out mitochondria required murdering a large number of pigeons. Their breast muscles have some of the highest rates of respiration known, many times better then ours. Reading this book inspired me to attempt to improve my mitochondrial health. So far the only stuff that seems to make a difference is NAD+ and Creatine.

Life: Inevitable or fluke? by Nick Lane https://nick-lane.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Lane-New-Sci-Life.pdf

It's definitely an open question. But in his book "The Vital Question", Nick Lane makes an interesting case that they're actually the origin of all life: https://nick-lane.net/books/the-vital-question-why-is-life-the-way-it-…

PDF: https://nick-lane.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Lane-Mol-Front-2019.p…

If you haven't read "The Vital Question" by Nick Lane yet, then you really should. One of the book's suggestions is that an energy-first analysis of life and the origins of life, can be incredibly explanatory—particularly since Science (and Pop-Science) has been so focused on genetics for so long. In terms of the origins of life, the idea is essentially that rather than try to imagine how RNA could "just appear", we should look for places where there were natural, persistent, energy fluxes (the "fires" as you say), and try to understand how these energy fluxes began to resemble cells. i.e., were constrained into cell-sizes and began replicating. Incidentally, the theory that Nick Lane puts forward of which particular energy fluxes gave rise to life is sea-floor alkaline hydrothermal vents[1]—which is also discussed in the book. [1] https://nick-lane.net/publications/origin-life-alkaline-hydrothermal-v…

The article seems to suggest he's simulating a "soup" of many different molecules and seeing which combinations lead to sustained reactions. Nick Lane's book "The Vital Question" [1] discounts the primordial soup idea (that life arose in tidal pools or streams near volcanos due to the right chemical mixture being present in the water at that time) and suggests underwater alkaline hydrothermal vents as the location of the first formation of life. The hydrothermal vents produced (see also his recent paper [2]) alkaline fluids which mixed with acidic seawater within micropores provided by the geological structures of a particular type of vent. This, he hypothesises, led to proton gradients which are essential for life. Of course, both these guys are experts at the top of their fields, at respected institutes. I possess neither of those qualities. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Vital-Question-Evolution-Origins-Complex/dp/039… [2] http://nick-lane.net/publications/origin-life-alkaline-hydrothermal-ve…

From Nick Lane's article "How did LUCA make a living? Chemiosmosis in the origin of life" http://www.nick-lane.net/LAM%20BioEssays.pdf > The concept of organic soup is nowadays closely allied to the idea that the origin of life and the origin of replication are the same thing. Natural selection remains the only mechanism known in which more complex forms can evolve, and natural selection requires a replicator. Regarding the nature of that replicator, there is currently no viable alternative to the idea that some kind of ‘RNA world’ existed, that is, there was a time before proteins and DNA, when RNA was the molecular basis of both catalysis and replication. Some elements of the RNA world concept are almost certainly correct. However, there is a strong version of this theory which states that RNA was once the only catalyst as well as the only replicator and so all the basic chemistry of life was invented by RNA.(4) This ‘RNA first’ theory is difficult to accept from the standpoint of the biochemistry of modern cells. For example, many essential enzymes are metalloproteins that contain mineral centres, such as iron-sulphur clusters, at their heart.(5) There is every reason to believe that such clusters, with the structures of inorganic minerals like greigite,(6,7) have more ancient roots even than those of RNA. > The recent abiotic synthesis of nucleotides using UV radiation and phosphate to purify intermediates(8) seems to lend support to the idea that the primordial…