Evolution of life : Molecular Engines.

In my last blog, I gave the overview of life, its origin and its significance. So now let’s talk science , i mean science at a deeper level. Let’s talk about biological engines. You see, in my previous blog I wrote that life as we perceive it is just a mere physical hologram of nature’s inner biochemical process. So to understand life, we must essentially understand its biochemical nature. Life as we know it is nothing but a collective outcome of multitude of biochemical reactions happening each and every second, thorough out the entire timeline of an organism. So if you genuinely want to understand life on earth then dive yourself into its inner working, I can assure that you will get some deeper insights. It will require a lot of brain power and effort to uncover the hidden reality. As I mentioned in my previous blog, scientist had gave their entire life in search of truth, sacrificing a lot throughout the process, and I think sacrifice is necessary because it is nature’s  demand.

Albert Einstein was so deeply engraved in his work that his personal life got ruined. But in return, his work changed the world forever. That man gave his entire life to scientific voyage. A voyage, in search of truth. Einstein in his later part of his life tried to solve the mystery of the fundamental forces of nature. He eventually tried to culminate or bring together all the four fundamental forces of nature and formulate a single equation that encompasses everything in this universe aka A Grand Unified Theory aka Theory of Everything. But unfortunately he died with his unfinished business, but he never gave up and died trying. When he was in his death bed, until the last second he was scribbling equations. I mean, holy crap !! He was truly a beast and a monster in scientific literacy. That level of curiosity and dedication made him immortal, he changed the paradigm of our scientific understanding at its very base. The next one is the person that I always look up to and is my academic forefather or you can say godfather. His name is Charles Darwin. I will elaborate the life of Charles Darwin in an another blog, but for the time being let me give you a brief overview about his work. If I want to sum up Charles Darwins work in one line, then it will be ‘ he changed the whole paradigm of our understanding about origin of life and how it reached this stage, from a single theory ‘. Charles Darwin went on a voyage to Galapagos Island when he was in his early 20s. He left behind his family and kids and went for a voyage in search of truth. One key skill that Darwin had that led to his success is his observatory skills. He observed the diversity of animals and birds on that group of islands and from his observation he formulated a theory ‘ The theory of Natural Selection ‘. This theory eventually became the most powerful and enlightening theory is all of biology. I mean literally !!! his theory can explain the origin of each and every living structure in this planet, holy shit !! it’s really astounding, it is like Newton's laws of motion for Biology, absolutely fundamental. Darwin’s theory is one of two corner stones of Biology, the other one is Genetics.

As as we saw it requires a lot of effort to keep up with nature. The Biomolecules which are termed as molecular engines are called Enzymes. These are nature’s nano-robots. Why Nanorobot’s ?? Since robots are made to minimise human efforts, likewise enzymes helps biological, both organic and inorganic reactions to proceed. On a side note, in layman terms anything that is made of carbon and hydrogen is called Organic and compound devoid of carbon and hydrogen is called Inorganic. The purpose of enzymes is to catalyse reactions and increase its speed. But the interesting fact is, it increases the speed at an unusual faster pace. Say for example, collagen takes millions of years to get degraded by normal biological means. But if we apply collagenase enzyme, then it will degrade it within 30 min. A trillion fold difference. Enzymes are very crucial for life to continue and even for life to origin in the first place. Now to understand the working of Enzymes, we first need to understand the base of Bioenergetics. It is really interesting how enzymes gets involved in a reaction to increase its efficiency. Bioenergetics will provide you immense knowledge about the nature of enzymes. But to really understand the working of enzymes we have to study a very precise and specific topic in biology termed as Quantum Biology. It is a relatively new domain in biology. Not much research happened in this subject but now with the advancement of technology, it is progressing at a faster pace. Science is really weird. It doesn’t tend to attract the most forward thinking people. Scientist are traditionally considered as mad, and I completely agree with it because to put something new to the table they have to think differently, they rewire their brain to think in a different manner.

And like enzymes, proteins are also a kind of molecule that is very fundamental to the origin of life on earth. Merely on earth is made of proteins. The in-depth study of proteins is called proteomics. Proteins are made of another fundamental molecule called Amino Acids. Quick fact, when 1953 Stanley Miller and Harold Urey done an experiment, they created the primordial soup where first life was originated. They had done it in a very sophisticated manner and the results were quite amazing. One of the most important molecules the found in their experiment is amino acids. Amino acids are molecules without which life on earth would have been impossible to prosper. Amino acids are key building blocks of human proteins. And proteins can be considered as the most important molecules in whole biology. Proteins are the key players in the game of life. If you can manipulate protein, you can manipulate anything.

So the life is a very picture is quite vague and cloudy  and it has many layers. So the key elements are the biomolecules constantly forming and degrading. So after studying these things, I feel like life is a product an incidence happened by chance or might be a mistake. And I am curious to answer these question ?

So thank you everyone, I hope you liked this blog and meet you in the next blog. Stay curious.