Institut des Biomolécules Max Mousseron (IBMM), UMR 5247, Université Montpellier 1 and 2, 34095 Montpellier Cedex 5, France.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2011 Oct 27;366(1580):2949-58. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2011.0135.
Thermodynamics provides an essential approach to understanding how living organisms survive in an organized state despite the second law. Exchanges with the environment constantly produce large amounts of entropy compensating for their own organized state. In addition to this constraint on self-organization, the free energy delivered to the system, in terms of potential, is essential to understand how a complex chemistry based on carbon has emerged. Accordingly, the amount of free energy brought about through discrete events must reach the strength needed to induce chemical changes in which covalent bonds are reorganized. The consequence of this constraint was scrutinized in relation to both the development of a carbon metabolism and that of translation. Amino acyl adenylates involved as aminoacylation intermediates of the latter process reach one of the higher free energy levels found in biochemistry, which may be informative on the range in which energy was exchanged in essential early biochemical processes. The consistency of this range with the amount of energy needed to weaken covalent bonds involving carbon may not be accidental but the consequence of the above mentioned thermodynamic constraints. This could be useful in building scenarios for the emergence and early development of translation.
热力学提供了一种重要的方法，可以帮助理解生物体如何在有组织的状态下生存，尽管存在第二定律。与环境的交换不断产生大量的熵，以补偿它们自身的有组织状态。除了对自组织的这种限制之外，以势能形式提供给系统的自由能对于理解基于碳的复杂化学是如何出现的至关重要。因此，通过离散事件带来的自由能必须达到足以诱导共价键重新组织的化学变化的强度。这种限制的后果与碳代谢和翻译的发展都有关。作为后者过程中氨酰基腺苷酸酰基化中间物的参与物达到了生物化学中发现的较高自由能水平之一，这可能有助于了解在重要的早期生化过程中交换能量的范围。这个范围与涉及碳的共价键变弱所需的能量量一致，这可能不是偶然的，而是上述热力学限制的结果。这对于构建翻译的出现和早期发展的情景可能是有用的。
