Winogradsky column

Winogradsky column Glass column with an anaerobic lower zone and an aerobic upper zone, which allows growth of microorganisms under conditions simitar to those found in nutrient-rich water and sediment. 

You can even make your own microbial community at home. If you collect a piece of an ecosystem and seal it up, it will develop automatically into a rainbow of layered bacteria. This experiment is called a Winogradsky column. 

FIG. 6.2 A Winogradsky column made from placing mud and lakewater in a flask. Note the similarity between the layers here and in Figure 6.1. 

Bacteria may not be able to move quickly or sense the environment in detail, but they know how to eat and grow. Each bacterium is a specialized and evolvable compartment that can take in, transform, and excrete diverse chemicals. Speciahzation leads to organization as the waste of one is eaten by another. The self-organization that happens in the Dead Sea and in Winogradsky columns must have happened on the early Earth. More molecules processed means more energy produced means more complexity from cooperation. 

A pair on display in the American Museum of Natural History in New York has been split apart to show the structure inside, so that they look like a pair of lungs. Very old stromatohtes have been found with sulfur isotope patterns caught in the layers that suggest that they lived off sulfur cycles like the lowest layers in a Winogradsky column. These stone lungs breathed sulfur. 

These elements are the basement and foundation of biochemistry. They are the chemical basis of the oldest metabohsms, the most ancient proteins, and the lowest levels in both Winogradsky columns and ocean sediments. 

Green sulfur bacteria, which avoid oxygen and form one of the bottom layers on a Winogradsky column, have the same wheel turning backward. If they Uke, they can inhale COj and add it to four-carbon molecules, forming six-carbon citrate. They pump electrons and hydrogens into the carbon rather than pull them off, and use it to build rather than to break down. It would have been easy to run the cycle this way billions of years ago, when there was more COj to push into it. This may be how the wheel got its start. 

The pattern is the same as the pattern of a Winogradsky column, where deeper means older. Oxygen controls the pattern of the Winogradsky column—so free oxygen could have controlled the pattern of chemical evolution over time as well. 

To make a Winogradsky column,. .. You can also purchase one from the Hiram Genomics Store http //anthony-marchi.squarespace.com/customized-winogradsky-columns-microcosms/. 

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