Bryson Chapter Questions

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Bryson chapter questions
Chapter 19: The rise of life
Q1
Life gradually arose from monomers with building blocks like amino acids being formed and finally combining to make a complex polymer (Bryson, Bill, and William, 289). Organic molecules required for life can be formed from inorganic components. It is important to understand that the first life was accompanied by polymers assembling structures or units that were able to replicate and sustain themselves.
Q2
Cyanobacteria are essential materials for the development and health of numerous plants. Cyanobacteria have a blue pigment that is called phycocyanin that captures light for photosynthesis. They also possess chlorophyll a, a photosynthesis pigment that plants use. Cyanobacteria, therefore, help in photosynthesis of plants hence crop production. Cyanobacteria are a small group of organism that can transform nitrogen in the atmosphere to ammonia and nitrate (Bryson, Bill, and William, 289). Plants need this fixed nitrogen forms for their growth. Oxygen using organism benefit from this change of environment in that in the process of converting inert atmospheric nitrogen to nitrate or ammonia oxygen is produced; hence these organisms have more oxygen to use. Cyanobacteria turned an oxygen-free atmosphere to significant quantities of oxygen.
Q3
Stromatolites are objects that resemble rocks and are produced in shallow waters by micro-organism living with single cells or by cyanobacteria joined together in subsequent layers sediment grains from carbonates.

Stromatolites are found deep under the sea where there is much sunlight which helps them keep up with the organic sediment layers (Bryson, Bill, and William, 291). The trapped sediments react with calcium carbonate to form limestone. The limestone builds up slowly to form stromatolite which takes so many years to grow to three feet tall. The presence of stromatolites indicates that prokaryotes existed suggesting that life had begun much earlier.
Q4
Proteins are mixed polymers with high molecular weight mainly comprising of alpha amino acids joined together with a peptide linkage. Proteins are major components of all the living matter, and they contain hydrogen, sulfur, nitrogen, carbon, and in others, phosphorous is also present (Bryson, Bill, and William, 291). The proteins join together through a non-homologous end joining in processes of DNA repair and insertion. The joining of the proteins takes place in the DNA, and it is initiated by a series of proteins that work jointly to prepare and ligate the broken ends of the DNA.

Work cited
Bryson, Bill, and William Roberts. A short history of nearly everything. Vol. 33. New York: Broadway Books, 2003