THIS IS HOW LIFE BEGAN ON OUR EARTH

Five billion years ago our planet earth was a very unfriendly place, very hot with carbon dioxide
gas bubbled from molten rock and filled the atmosphere, causing such a massive greenhouse
effect that the planet literally boiled dry. Living organism could not survive under those
conditions. But when water vapour to liquefy just under four billion years ago, life was said to
have appeared but was not life as we know it now. Molecules that could replicate to produce
daughter molecules with inherited characteristics, eventually microscopic single-celled
organisms evolved.

These early life forms had to withstand

volatile atmosphere with toxic
gases,erupting volcanoes, dramatic
electrical storms and the sun’s ultraviolet
rays all promoting uncontrolled
electrochemical and photochemical
reactions. The microbes resembled today’s
‘Extremophiles’, a type of bacteria so-called
because they thrive in all the particularly
hostile corners of the globe. Extremophiles inhabit acid lakes, hyper-saline salt marshes and
the super heated water issuing from hot vents at the bottom of the deepest ocean trenches
where they survive temperatures up to 1500C and 2500C. They also lie buried deep in the polar ice caps,
and lurk in rocks. It is possible that life began with microbes in rocks deer underground, where the heat is intense
and there is an ample supply of water and chemicals to get the whole process started.

Coral like structures housed

“Extremophiles” (stromatolites), also
known as microbial mats because they
look like door mats; which are flat,
brown and hairy. These have thriving
communities of interdependent
microbes, utilizing another’s waste to
produce energy in a self sustaining
food chain or micro-ecosystem. Today,
we can still see these in Yellowstone
Park, Wyoming, USA and along the shores of Western Australia, where the water is rich in
 chemicals and undisturbed by other forms of life. Ancient
layered rock structures are the fossilized remains of
stromatolites that dominated aquatic ecosystems some two
billion to four billion years ago.
For around three billion years bacteria had Earth all to them-
selves and they diversified to occupy every possible niche.
At this stage there was no oxygen in the atmosphere so
they evolved many different ways of unlocking the energy
bound up in rocks, utilizing chemical compounds of sulphur,
nitrogen and iron. Then around 2-3 billion years ago a group
of innovative microbes called the cyanobacteria (previously
called blue-green algae) learnt the trick of photosynthesis,
using sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into
energy rich carbohydrates. As a result, oxygen, a waste
product of this reaction, slowly accumulated in Earth’s
atmosphere. At first oxygen was poisonous to early life
forms, but then other ingenious bacteria discovered that it
could also be used to generate energy. These new energy
sources were rich to support more complex life forms, but
the emergence of multicellular organisms had to await the evolution of eukaryotic cells.

Bacteria are “prokaryotes”, meaning that their cells are smaller than those of all higher
organisms “eukaryotes” and have a simpler structure, lacking a well-defined nucleus. But
around a billion years ago a group of free-living photosynthetic cyanobacteria took up
residence inside other primitive single-celled organisms to form the energy—generating
chloroplast of the first plant cells. And in a similarly extraordinary manoeuvre oxygen-utilizing
microbes called alpha proteobacteria became incorporated into other microbes as mitochondria,
the powerhouse of animal cells.

So finally, a mere 6oo million

years ago, the stage was set for
the evolution of multicellular
organisms made up of eukaryotic
cells, and eventually the
emergence of the plants and
animals we know today. But
compared to the diversity of bacteria, all other life forms, however different they may seem, are
homogeneous, locked into the same biochemical cycle for energy production, and requiring
sunlight for plant photosynthesis to generate the oxygen used by animals for respiration.

We still rely on bacteria (in the form of

chloroplasts and mitochondria) for these
reactions, and on free-living bacteria for all
other chemical processes needed to maintain
the stability of the planet. These bacteria
recycle the elements which are essential for
life on Earth and are at the heart of our
balanced ecosystems, those complex
interdependent relationships that exist between plants, animals and the environment.

Although bacteria and single-celled protozoa

(plasmodium) were the first to inhabit in our earth.
Plasmodium that causes malaria, probably represent
the earliest and simplest forms of animal life. The
tiniest of all microbes, viruses, probably also evolved
several million years ago. They have diversified to
infect all living things including bacteria, but exactly
how and when they came into being is unknown. The
genetic material of viruses consists of either DNA or
RNA, but most only code for up to aoo proteins and
cannot survive on their own. So viruses are obligate
parasites and only when they have sabotaged their
host’s cells do they spring to life. Once inside they turn
the cell into a factory for virus production and within
hours thousands of new viruses are ready to infect
more cells or seek another host to colonize.

Perhaps because they are so small, nowadays

microbes seem to be overshadowed by larger forms of life, but they are still by far the most
abundant on the planet, constituting some twenty-five times the total biomass of all animal life.
There are well over a million different types, mostly harmless environmental microbes. They
are in the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat and when we die they set
about deconstructing us. Each ton of soil contains more than 50,000,000,000,000,000
microbes,1 many of which are employed in breaking down organic material to generate
essential nitrates for plants to utilize; every year nitrogen.-fixing bacteria recycle 140 million
tons of atmospheric nitrogen back into the soil.

Bacteria and viruses are also a key part of marine ecosystems, forming by far the largest
biomass in the oceans. There are at least a million bacteria in every millilitre of seawater, most
abundant in estuarine waters where they break down organic matter. Marine viruses control the
numbers of these bacteria by infecting and killing them, particularly when they undergo a
population explosion and produce algal blooms. In coastal waters viruses greatly outnumber
bacteria, reaching concentrations of around 100 million in every millilitre, totaling an incredible
in the oceans. Tiny as they are, if placed end to end thei,- would stretch for to million light
years, or too times across the galaxy.2

Bacteria are masters at survival, and when adverse conditions come along they are generally
ready. Adaptability is the key to their success, yet in theory reproducing by binary fission yields
offspring that are all identical to the parent—a process that apparently leaves no room for
variability. But although their DNA copying machinery is accurate, mistakes occur which are
corrected by a cellular proofreading system. Even so, occasional errors slip through unnoticed
and these heritable changes to the genetic code (mutations) may cause changes to their
offspring. This is the basis of evolution by natural selection. In humans and other animals
evolutionary change is a slow process because of our long generation times, but for bacteria,
which reproduce very fast and have a less effective DNA proofreading system, rapid change by
mutation is their lifeline. A single bacterial gene mutates at a rate of one change per - cell
divisions, so in a rapidly dividing colony many thousands of mutants are thrown up. A few of
these mutations will confer a survival advantage and these progeny will then quickly out-
compete their rivals and come to dominate the population.

Bacteria have several other tricks

to help them adapt- rapidly to a
changing environment, mostly
involving gene swapping. Many
bacteria contain plasmids, circular
DNA molecules that live inside the
bacterial cell but are separate from
the chromosome and divide
independently. They supply their host bacteria with extra survival information and can pass
directly from one bacterium to another during conjugation. This involves the outgrowth of a
filament called a ‘sex pilus’ which acts like a temporary bridge between the donor (male) and
the neighbouring recipient (female) bacterium giving plasnnds free access and allowing sur-
vival genes to spread rapidly through bacterial communities. Several genes that code for
antibiotic resistance, allowing bacteria to survive in the face of antibiotic treatment, are carried
on plasmids, and they have succeeded in spreading worldwide.

Another way that genes can jump between

bacteria is by using viruses called
bacteriophages, or phages for short. All
viruses are cellular parasites, and phages
commandeer the bacteria’s protein making
machinery to generate thousands of their
own offspring, most of which carry a copy of
DNA identical to the parent phage. But
around one phage in a million mistakenly picks up an extra piece of DNA, either from the
bacterial chromosome or from a resident plasmid, and carries it to the next bacterium it infects,
If this extra piece of DNA codes for a protein that improves survival then natural selection will
ensure that the offspring of the recipient bacterium will prosper at the expense of others. with
their host bacteria, with the phage being safely housed inside the bacterium and the bacterium
in turn being protected from infection by other more destructive phages. Remarkably, the toxin
that can fatally damage the heart and nerves during a diphtheria infection, and another that
causes ‘the catastrophic diarrhoea of cholera, are both coded for by phages resident in the
bacteria rather than by the bacteria themselves. Without their phages Corynebacterium
diphtheriae and vibriv cholerae are harmless.

At some stage in the distant past, groups of resourceful microbes found a niche in or on the
bodies of other living things and evolved to parasitize host species. From that time on the
struggle for survival has shaped the evolution of both parties. On occasion, a comfortable
symbiotic relationship developed, like, for example, the microbial communities that form self-
sustaining ecosystems in the guts of their hosts. For ruminants such as cows the advantages
of this partnership are obvious; the microbes are bathed in nutrients and protected from the
outside world while they digest the cellulose in plant cell walls which cattle are unable to do for
themselves. In humans, however, the function of gut microbes is not so clear. We each house
up to 1014 microbes, weighing in total around t kg, and outnumbering our own body cells by ten
to one. So far, more than 400 different species have been identified which probably protect us
from attack by more virulent microbes, aid our digestion and stimulate our immunity.4 They are
harmless as long as we are healthy, but if they manage to invade our tissues, perhaps through
a surgical wound, they can cause nasty infections.

Of the million or so microbes in existence, only 1,415 are known to cause disease in humans.5
But despite their significance to us, these pathogenic microbes are not primarily concerned
with making us ill.

The sometimes devastating symptoms they produce are really just a side—effect of their life
cycle being enacted inside our bodies. However, they certainly use each step of the infection
process to their own advantage, and natural selection ensures the microbes that induce
disease patterns that are best designed to assist their reproduction and spread survive at the
expense of their more sluggish siblings. So over
time disease patterns have been sharply honed
by evolution to ensure the survival of the
causative microbes. A highly virulent lifestyle,
killing the victim outright, is not advantageous to
microbes as they will then be without a home
and probably die along with their host. Yet less
virulent microbes risk being rapidly conquered
by the host’s immune system, and this also
curtails their spread. Over centuries of
coexistence of microbes and their human host,
evolution has fine-tuned the balance between
these two extremes to optimize survival of both
species, but the rapid adaptability of microbes means that
"they are generally one step ahead in the ongoing struggle, we may never win".
___________________________________________________________________________

REFERENCE
"Deadly Companions"
By: Dorothy H Crawford
Delightful, well documented and enlightening. If you are keen to understand more
about micro-organism and how they have evolved and learn more about antibiotic
resistance, please read this book first.
“Knowledge about Health is Knowledge of Life”