RNA's First Four Billion Years on Earth: A Biography

The First Four Billion Years

Life: the first two billion years.

Microfossils, stromatolites, preserved lipids and biologically informative isotopic ratios provide a substantial record of bacterial diversity and biogeochemical cycles in Proterozoic (2500-541 Ma) oceans that can be interpreted, at least broadly, in terms of present-day organisms and metabolic processes. Archean (more than 2500 Ma) sedimentary rocks add at least a billion years to the recorded...

The record of impact processes on the early Earth: A review of the first 2.5 billion years

Collisions and impact processes have been important throughout the history of the solar system, including that of the Earth. Small bodies in the early solar system, the planetesimals, grew through collisions, ultimately forming the planets. The Earth started growing ca. 4.56 Ga in this way. Its early history was dominated by violent impacts and collisions, of which we only have circumstantial e...

Conservation of protein structure over four billion years.

Little is known about the evolution of protein structures and the degree of protein structure conservation over planetary time scales. Here, we report the X-ray crystal structures of seven laboratory resurrections of Precambrian thioredoxins dating up to approximately four billion years ago. Despite considerable sequence differences compared with extant enzymes, the ancestral proteins display t...

The first billion years: new insights from geochemistry

Prologue: (V)ast globes. . . after reaching the last stages of ebullition, were coveredwith scoriae like bubbling foam. And the crust which covered the molten matter of the globe and which hardened from the fused condition would be like scoria, as happens with metals in the furnace. If then the great framework of the earth, the exposed rocks, the imperishable silicates, are almost entirely vitr...