Urey and Miller Experiment Short Notes | Evolution Class 12 Notes

Urey and Miller Experiment Short Notes

• Life originated from chemicals through a series of chemical reaction in ocean
• Origin of life by chemical evolution was proposed by oparin and haldane
• No experimental evidence for oparin views until 1953
• In 1953, Urey and his student miller gives evidence for this chemical evolution

EXPERIMENT OF MILLER & UREY

• Miller created primitive earth conditions in laboratory
• He took CH4,NH3,H2 and Water vapor in large flask
• He created eclectic shock by using two tungsten electrodes as source of energy
• The mixture cooled in condenser and liquefied and liquid was collected another flask
• After two weeks he observed the formation of simple amino acids like glycine, alanine and aspartic acid

Similar Experiments

In 1961, Joan Oro found that amino acids could be made from hydrogen cyanide (HCN) and ammonia in a water solution. He also found that his experiment produced a large amount of the nucleotide base adenine which is one of the four bases in RNA and DNA. It is also a component of ATP, which is a major energy releasing molecule in cells.

Experiments conducted later showed that other RNA and DNA bases could be obtained through simulated prebiotic chemistry (deals with origins of life: how the first molecular building blocks of life were formed and self-assembled into replicating systems) with a reducing atmosphere (an atmosphere characterized by little or no free oxygen but contains hydrogen or hydrogen-containing compounds such as methane or ammonia – the atmospheric conditions believed to be on early Earth).

Other Important Topics

• Theories of Origin of Life Short Notes