Dwarkesh Patel: evaluation

Transcript context

…That’s basically it. What do you get if you react hydrogen and CO2? What you get are what are called Krebs cycle intermediates. So carboxylic acids, small molecules made only of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, with this organic acid group at the end, which can be 2, 3, 4, 5 carbon units in the chain. This is your basic building blocks. You add on ammonia to this and you get an amino acid. You add more hydrogen on, and you’re going to get a sugar. You react amino acids with sugars, and you’re going to get nucleotides. There are lots of steps along here, but this is the basic starting point for all of biosynthesis in biochemistry. Then if you make fatty acids, they will spontaneously, because of the hydrophilic nature of their different sides, they will spontaneously form a membrane. As I say, Krebs cycle intermediates are short-chain carboxylic acids. A fatty acid is a long chain, 10, 12, 15 carbons in the chain instead of four or five. They will spontaneously, not just alone usually but if you’ve got other long-chain hydrocarbons mixed up with them—then you will form a bilayer membrane spontaneously. We’ve done this in the lab, and it’s pretty robust. You can make these things at 70-90° centigrade, across a range of pH from around pH 7 up to about pH 12, and in the presence of ions like calcium and magnesium and other salts and so on. You make a vesicle with a bilayer membrane around it, which is the same as a cell membrane. They’re amazingly dynamic things. They’re always fusing with each other and breaking apart, fissioning, separating into two or three. They’re very dynamic things under a microscope.…

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