- [Voiceover] What I want to do in this video is talk
about the processes that make all life as we know it,
life as we know it,
and at it's essence, we can call this metabolism.
Metabolism.
And this is the taking energy in different forms,
breaking it down into its more fundamental components,
and then building it up in ways that we would find useful,
useful for energy, useful for structure,
so that we can actually live our lives,
we can grow, we can reproduce,
we can respond to our surroundings.
So as I just said, metabolism,
and we're gonna go into a bunch of examples of this.
Metabolism at it's heart is really two different processes.
There's the breaking down of the substances
for energy or for structure to getting back
to the building blocks,
and we call that catabolism.
Catabolism.
So this is the breaking down of things
and then once we've broken down things,
we're ready to rebuild them in ways
that we would find useful,
and we call this anabolism.
Anabolism or anabolism.
Anabolism, just like that.
And one way to think about it is
imagine that someone had built something with Legos
and you want to build something with Legos.
Well you could go to those Legos
and you'd want to break it down,
but not break it down too much.
You wouldn't melt the plastic.
You would break it down into the individual Lego pieces
and then you would build it back up
into whatever shape that you actually cared about.
And you might not actually have to even break it down
all the way to the basic Lego pieces.
There might be structures in that first Lego castle
that was constructed that you might find useful.
So let's just think about how all of this gets started.
And what's exciting is that all of this got started,
or gets started, from stars, from fusion reactions in stars.
And this right over here is a picture of a star,
and a star that we are very familiar with.
This is the sun.
But you may or may not realize that the sun
is only one of probably several stars
that have been involved in life as we know it.
The sun is our most direct source of energy
for most of life as we know it.
There are some bacteria
and things that are able to live off of vents
at the bottom of the ocean because of the heat created,
but the sun is our primary source of energy.
But when I say that other stars might have been involved,
including dead stars that existed billions of years ago,
it's because the heavier elements that we're composed of,
or that are around us in the environment,
the carbon, the oxygen, we could just keep going,
pretty much everything other than hydrogen,
it was constructed in fusion reactions from hydrogen
inside of stars.
So we really are made up of the remnants of stars.
And so here we are, we're on Earth.
Earth is all this condensed matter
from four and a half billion years ago.
Probably some nearby supernova got all of this dust
that was constructed in a previous star
to coalesce in that way, and you have radiation.
You have energy from the sun.
And once again, that energy's coming from fusion reactions,
and it's what fusing lighter elements into heavier elements,
so the sun is also constructing more heavy elements,
but that energy,
that energy makes its way to the Earth.
And you have organisms,
like plants, that are able to use that energy
to construct the material,
the food, we could say,
that is eventually going to get around to us.
And so this process you may or may not be familiar with it,
this is photosynthesis.
And we're going to go into a lot more detail.
Synthesis.
And as the word implies, photo, it's photosynthesis,
it's making things out of light,
and one thing I like to ask people
when they are first exposed to photosynthesis,
is like okay, we can see this grass growing
or we can see this wheat growing,
or we can see a tree growing,
but where is that material coming from?
And the most common answer is like,
"Oh, somehow it's coming from the ground,"
and there are some nutrients that are coming from the ground
but it's really all about fixing carbon,
and you're going to hear about this a lot
especially as we talk about the carbon cycle.
But you have carbon dioxide primarily in the air,
so you have carbon,
you have, I'll just write it this way.
So you have carbon dioxide in the air
and what photosynthesis allows these plants to do
is take the carbon in that carbon dioxide
and form bonds with it,
turn it from its gas form into solid forms,
into glucose molecules, and then use that glucose
to build up cellulose and to build out other forms of starch
and whatever else it might be.
So it's taking these molecules in the air...
I'll just draw them as these little...
It's taking these molecules
that are in the air,
and it's using the energy of the sun to fix them,
to actually form bonds
between the carbons and with other things.
As we said, we're mostly carbon and hydrogen
and we have some oxygen in there,
but we're able to form these structures.
Now from there other living organisms,
and this is a huge oversimplification,
it could involve bacteria,
it could involve all sorts of things.
And just a reminder, you know, that photosynthesis,
it isn't just light and it isn't just the carbon dioxide.
It also involves the water and we talk about that.
So you also have water involved.
You also have the water involved.
So you have the carbon dioxide,
so CO2, light from the sun, and water.
These things are able to grow and nutrients from the Earth.
And then from that, you're able to construct things like,
well, you can directly go to these plants
that are taking energy from the sun
and construct things like bread
or you have other animals that will eat things
like the grass, and then break them down
in their own way and they will be assisted by bacteria
and then rebuild themselves up
into a cow, into milk.
And so what this cow is doing,
it's metabolizing this grass.
It's able to break it down, it's able to
catabolize the various molecules
in the grass and break them down into building blocks
that can then used to build up the cow,
to build up milk, and whatever else.
And you might be saying, "What are these types of molecules
"that we keep breaking down
"and then building back up?"
Well, you have carbohydrates.
Carbohydrates,
and you're going to see most of the molecules
that I'm about to talk about.
Frankly, all of them on the back of nutritional package
because it tells you what's inside of it.
What is your body going to metabolize
when it eats that
whatever's inside of the package?
So carbohydrates, these are either simple sugars
like glucose or fructose,
or it could be polymers of these sugars,
polysaccharides.
It could be starches
made up of many, many elements of the...
Or many, many multiples of these simple sugars.
We could be talking about lipids.
Lipids.
So fatty acids, we could be talking about cholesterols.
These are essential structures,
and they're also essential for,
well, various metabolic pathways
inside of, well, all of life,
or it could be proteins.
It could be
proteins made up of amino acids.
Sometimes people say the reason why you want the proteins
is because it's made up of these amino acids.
So you could break down these proteins
and get the amino acids and then build it up
into new proteins.
Proteins and amino acids.
And all of these things, they are found
in things like in the foods,
in the foods we eat,
which we will then consume,
we will then metabolize.
We will first catabolize them and break them down
and then we will use those building blocks
to build it back up.
And at the end of the day, these provide the structures
that make our bodies what they are.
They allows us to interact with our environment
and they provide energy,
and that energy, at the end of the day,
the true molecular currency for that energy
is a molecule called ATP.
That's a molecule of ATP right over there.
Adenosine triphosphate.
And the key for ATP, why it is the molecular currency
for energy, are the three phosphate groups.
So it has these three phosphate groups
and we have a whole video on it,
or a whole series of videos on it really,
but the main key
is that there's a lot of energy,
especially beween I guess on the last phosphate group.
And this energy and that bond
as the phosphate group breaks off it can release it
to provide all sorts of life mechanisms
including being able to metabolize things.
So ATP right over here, this is the currency
of energy in life as we know it.
And it's actually an interesting molecule
because it's essentially, it's a piece of...
If you were to just take this section of it right over here,
it really is, it looks like a piece of RNA.
It looks like you're taking a...
You have ribose, you have the adenine,
you have a phosphate group,
and it can actually be used to construct things like RNA
and even DNA
beyond just being the molecular currency of energy.
So it's fun to see how these pieces all fit together,
how they can be broken up,
and you see these patterns over and over again
in biological systems, and these biological systems
are really just made up of breaking down
and building back up carbohydrates, lipids,
fatty acids, cholesterols, other things,
and proteins/amino acids.
So this whole thing, you know, look around you,
look at your day, look at the things you're consuming
and you'll see this pattern over and over and over again
and it's all a little mind-blowing,
because at the end of the day,
the energy is coming from the fusion reaction in stars
and all of the heavy elements around you
or even the not so heavy elements,
all of the carbon, the oxygen,
all of the really non-hydrogen elements,
they've been made inside of fusion reactions
in stars that might have existed billions and billions
and billions of years ago,
so hopefully that makes you feel a little bit more connected
to the universe.