Nick Lane Quotes

[T]here's a limit to just how far vents can take you... but... once you've gotten as far as , then you've freed yourself from a fairly small energy flow, a fairly tight and focused energy flow.

Whether or not it would be possible to drive the kind of protein machinery that you see in modern cells, like an ... that makes the energy currency of life... If it were just sitting there in a in a vent, can work out whether the natural... ion gradients in these vents would be... powerful enough to drive this machine to work. ...[Y]ou need to know what are the substrates, what are... the materials that it needs to operate? Where are they coming from? What's the concentration of them? You realize that you have no answer to any of those, and then what's the product? Well, it disappears off somewhere else, as well. So how can selection act if you've got stuff coming in from some unknown place and the product leaving to some unknown place? It made me realize that cellularization is important as a way of keeping the inside in and in keeping the outside out, and so I now have problems with the idea of seeing the entire vent as a kind of a living system.

Does it make sense that life is cellular? Would you expect to find life being cellular elsewhere? I suspect that for organic life... it would be cellular.

The DNA code is inert... stored safely... For daily use the cell relies on disposable photocopies... made of RNA... composed of similar building blocks... spun out on a single strand rather than the... double helix.

s are the crowning glory of life. ...[T]he rich variety of life is almost entirely attributable to the... variety of proteins. ...Perhaps the most important group are the s ...biological catalysts that speed up the rate of biochemical reactions ...with an astonishing degree of selectivity for ...raw materials.

The sequence of letters in a specifies the sequence of s in a protein. If the sequence of letters is changed—a ''—this may change the structure of the protein (...not always, there is some redundancy... technically degeneracy..—several combinations... can code for the same amino acid.)

The information encoded in DNA spells out the molecular structure of s. This, said Crick, is the 'central dogma' of all biology: genes code for proteins.

[N]o bacteria coat their DNA with s: their DNA is naked. The histones not only protect eukaryotic DNA from chemical attack, but also guard access to the genes.

In bacteria, the DNA forms into a long and twisted loop. The contorted tracks... close... to form a singular circular . In eukaryotic cells, there are usually a number of different chromosomes... each has two separate ends.

The possessors of... nuclei, the s, are the most important cells in the world. ...[A]ll plants and animals, all and fungi... essentially everything we can see with the naked eye, is composed of [them]...

[B]acteria, the simplest of cells, are... so complex that we still have almost everything to learn about their invisible organization.

This membrane, so vanishingly thin, looms large... for bacteria use it for generating their energy.

[L]ife will probably get stuck in a bacterial rut elsewhere in the universe... we might not be alone, but will almost certainly be lonely.

Different species have transferred different genes to the nucleus, but all species with mitochondria have... retained... the same core contingent of mitochondrial genes.

[T]he mechanism by which mitochondria generate energy, by pumping protons across a membrane (), is found in all forms of life... It's a bazarre way... This idea, however... won Peter Mitchell a Nobel Prize...