Why is life based on the element carbon?
There are two important properties of carbon that make it a suitable element to form the compounds in living things: Firstly, carbon atoms can link together to form stable chains of great length. (This process is called catenation.) Carbon atoms bind strongly to each other and so often form very large molecules which are built around a carbon ‘backbone’. The covalent bond between two carbon atoms is strong so that the backbones are stable. In all of these compounds simple sub-units called monomers are linked together by condensation reactions. Carbohydrates, proteins and nucleic acids are formed when large numbers of these sub-units bond together to form huge macromolecules called polymers.
