My favoryte molecule

There is a molecule in nature that makes life possible. Not life in general, but our life.

At the beginning of time there was a desert landscape, water, carbon, sunlight, proper temperature ... and the miracle happened, the first organisms appeared. However these beings are very far from what we know as superior life, that is, us. What was necessary from the physiological point of view for such a primitive organism to evolve into what we are?

It was necessary for living beings not to expend all their energy in producing food. We, heterotrophs (of the gr. -Hetero: the other and - trophos: food) consume the foods produced by other organisms, the autotrophs, from water, carbon and sunlight thanks to a wonderful molecule: CHLOROPHYLL.

Chlorophyll is a green pigment found in almost all plants, algae and cyanobacteria. As a curious fact it can be mentioned that its structure is very similar to hemoglobin, with the difference that hemoglobin has an Iron core and chlorophyll has a core of Magnesium, as shown in the following image :

This molecule is responsible for performing photosynthesis, the transformation of light energy into chemical energy releasing oxygen. Here is the definition of Wikipedia:

Photosynthesis (from ancient Greek φῶς-φωτός [fos-fotós], 'light', and σύνθεσις [sýnthesis], 'composition', 'synthesis') or chlorophilic function is the conversion of inorganic matter into organic matter thanks to energy which brings light. (...) Life on our planet is maintained mainly thanks to photosynthesis. (...) In fact, each year photosynthetic organisms fix in the form of organic matter around 100 billion tons of carbon.

That is, this chemical equation is what makes our life possible on earth, we depend on plants (or other animals that in turn consume plants) in order to exist in this world. This process has been studied from Aristotle to the present, with important contributions from Senebier , Liebig and Calvin , among others, being Sachs who first formulated the basic equation of photosynthesis that I present below:

Fuente

The photosynthesis happens then thanks to chlorophyll, which is also my favorite molecule. We depend on a small molecule that is green because it does not want green, and that curiously is almost identical to the hemoglobin we carry in our blood. We depend on an equation so similar to life itself that it has a luminous phase and a dark phase. I understand the electron transport chain, the Calvin cycle and all the theories generated from experiments of many centuries, I understand them, but it still seems a miracle that a molecule can be excited in the presence of light to provide oxygen and food, and that this happens constantly without our being aware of it at times. I think that thanks to chlorophyll it makes sense the phrase "The sun goes out for all", otherwise its light would have no purpose of existence. I apologize for using the Science tag, because for me this is magic.