Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

The notion that organisms maintain an overall homeostasis by stabilising complementary patterns of metabolic flux in different tissues is less familiar, but the large genomes of eukaryotic cells enable exactly this.

enabling the pumping of six rather than ten protons

Crosses between species do indeed cause ‘hybrid breakdown’, attributed to incompatibilities between mitochondrial and nuclear genes.

Turin concludes from this that consciousness is not an emergent property of the complex nervous systems of higher animals, but is something more fundamental that works at the level of cells.

‘balancer’ chromosomes. These chromosomes contain multiple inverted sequences, meaning that big chunks have been cut out, flipped around and reinserted backwards.

Most amino acids are made directly or indirectly from molecules in the Krebs cycle. So are the long-chain lipid molecules needed to make cell membranes.

It costs time and energy to build the perfect protein, and there are tens of millions of them in each cell. If either time or energy is limited (and the faster you live, the less you will have of each to spare), then it’s only a matter of time before some proportion becomes dysfunctional. The question is, does that matter? The answer depends a grea

The reason flux goes one way rather than the other reflects the environmental driving force. In hydrothermal vents, that driving force is hydrogen, which pushes flux in the direction of making new organic molecules. But if hydrothermal flow fluctuates, the concentration of H2 is bound to fall. Leave the vent and the driving force begins to push the

In the next chapter, we’ll see that this so-called ‘reverse’ Krebs cycle makes much more sense of evolution.