The Oparin-Haldance hypothesis proposes that with the primitive atmosphere reducing, and if there was an appropriate supply

of energy, then a variety of organic compounds could be synthesized. The atmosphere then was mostly methane, ammonia, and water vapor, with electrons readily available for synthesis of organic molecules. These compounds would have reacted spontaneously and formed the first organic molecules by abiotic synthesis. The energy required for these reactions likely came from lightning and UV radiation. After forming in the early atmosphere, the first compounds would have been transported into oceans and accumulated in large quantities. This made oceans then a primitive soup. In the 1950s, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey recreated an early Earth environment to test which organic compounds could form. Under those conditions with electric currents as an energy source (synthetic lightning), amino acid polymers could be produced. These organic molecules were able to form without enzymes suggesting how biological macromolecules were formed on early Earth. Experiments have also yielded nitrogenous bases which are a component of nucleic acids. Thomas Cech and Sidney Altman suggested RNA was the first nucleic acid. They also found RNA, which normally carries out protein synthesis, could also carry out enzyme-like catalytic functions. Cech called these RNA catalysts ribozymes. They supposed RNA, with their protobionts, gained the ability to carry genetic code. It also suggested that RNA molecules were acted on by natural selection, then evolving into DNA. Protobionts, aggregates of abiotically produced organic molecules surrounded by a membrane-like structure likely led to the origin or prokaryotes. The membranes were likely formed by liposomes organizing into a bilayer. The protobionts had limited amounts of genetic information, but the most successful would increase in number and eventually form the first prokaryotes. The oldest known fossils, stromatolites, were structures composed of bacteria and sediment. After prokaryotes began to flourish, a model known as endosymbiosis likely proposes how phagocytosis of mitochondrion and plastid-like cells into larger host prokaryotes likely led to the development of eukaryotic cells. If the host engulfed a plastid or mitochondrion and didnt digest it, then the two cells probably developed a mutually beneficial relationship and ultimately evolved into an organelle-filled eukaryotic cell. This model also suggests the mitochondria evolved before plastids. Evidence supports this model because the mitochondria and plastids replicate by a process similar to bacterial binary-fusion and contain identical enzymes and transport systems.