Chapter 1
Our Living World Rests upon a Foundation
of Microorganisms: The Constant Struggle
for Habitat and Niche
Christon J. Hurst
Abstract Microbes are the foundation upon which our living world rests. All of life
evolved to use the activities and products of microorganisms as not only our
foundation but also as the basis for our building blocks. The interactions between
species often may seem cooperatively peaceful, but in fact they represent a competition for habitat and niche.
1.1 Introduction
The organic chemicals that may have begun with a spark of energy gave rise to an
organized and interconnected biosphere.
1.1.1 Perhaps it Started with a Spark
Our living world presumably would have begun as a collection of water, minerals,
simple chemical compounds, and sources of energy. During the 1950s, Harold
Clayton Urey and his student Stanley Lloyd Miller tried to understand how the
complex chemical compounds used to assemble life on our planet might have
formed. The sources of energy which they considered to initially have been available
for creating those organic compounds were: cosmic rays, which they believed would
have had a negligible role; electric discharges; ultraviolet light; and thermal energy.
Their initial experimental discovery was that amino acids could be generated when
vapor from a boiling flask of water was recirculated through a sealed glass reactor.
The sealed system in their experiments contained CH 4 , NH 3 and H 2 in addition to the
liquid water, and included tungsten electrodes that exposed the recirculating mixture
to an electric discharge (Miller 1953). A more detailed evaluation of their
C. J. Hurst (*)
Cincinnati, OH, USA
Universidad del Valle Cali, Santiago de Cali, Valle, Colombia
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
C. J. Hurst (ed.), Microbes: The Foundation Stone of the Biosphere, Advances in
Environmental Microbiology 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63512-1_1
3
Our Living World Rests upon a Foundation
of Microorganisms: The Constant Struggle
for Habitat and Niche
Christon J. Hurst
Abstract Microbes are the foundation upon which our living world rests. All of life
evolved to use the activities and products of microorganisms as not only our
foundation but also as the basis for our building blocks. The interactions between
species often may seem cooperatively peaceful, but in fact they represent a competition for habitat and niche.
1.1 Introduction
The organic chemicals that may have begun with a spark of energy gave rise to an
organized and interconnected biosphere.
1.1.1 Perhaps it Started with a Spark
Our living world presumably would have begun as a collection of water, minerals,
simple chemical compounds, and sources of energy. During the 1950s, Harold
Clayton Urey and his student Stanley Lloyd Miller tried to understand how the
complex chemical compounds used to assemble life on our planet might have
formed. The sources of energy which they considered to initially have been available
for creating those organic compounds were: cosmic rays, which they believed would
have had a negligible role; electric discharges; ultraviolet light; and thermal energy.
Their initial experimental discovery was that amino acids could be generated when
vapor from a boiling flask of water was recirculated through a sealed glass reactor.
The sealed system in their experiments contained CH 4 , NH 3 and H 2 in addition to the
liquid water, and included tungsten electrodes that exposed the recirculating mixture
to an electric discharge (Miller 1953). A more detailed evaluation of their
C. J. Hurst (*)
Cincinnati, OH, USA
Universidad del Valle Cali, Santiago de Cali, Valle, Colombia
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
C. J. Hurst (ed.), Microbes: The Foundation Stone of the Biosphere, Advances in
Environmental Microbiology 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63512-1_1
3