Life

Living organisms are entities that utilise nucleic acids to encode information about proteins, and are dependent on a process that assembles proteins from an RNA template. This definition is intended to include viruses as well as three forms of cellular life - the Bacteria or Eubacteria, the Archaea or Archaebacteria, and the eukaryotes.

Life includes energy-consuming replicating entities that rely on nucleic acids to provide organizational information. Life is usually thought of as being cellular, includes prokaryotes (Archaebacteria and Eubacteria), plants, fungi, protists, and animals. Viruses are included as life forms. At this time, the hypothesis that life occurs uniquely on Earth remains unfalsified.

Biotaare the total collection oforganismsof a geographic region or a time period, from local geographic scales and instantaneous temporal scales all the way up to whole-planet and whole-timescalespatiotemporal scales. The biota, orbiotic componentof theEarthmake up thebiosphere.