tRNA pieces in archaeal genomes, what do they tell us?

Kosuke Fujishima
NASA Ames Research Center

It is hypothesized that the evolutionary flow of life can be divided into two stages: a prebiotic world based on nucleic acids (presumably RNA) as functional polymers and the subsequent protein-based world. According to the Central Dogma of molecular biology, genetic information in modern living systems flows from DNA to RNA and next to proteins. In this scheme, gene is a basic module encoding information for non-coding RNA or proteins. To explain the origin and early evolution of genes, Walter Gilbert proposed the Exon Theory of Genes (also known as...

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2011 Suddath Symposium: The Ribosome: Structure, Function & Evolution

Summarized by Loren Williams

The 19th Annual Suddath Symposium was held at Georgia Tech on April 1 & 2, 2011. This year’s Suddath Symposium, focusing on the ribosome, brought together researchers exploring ribosome origins, evolution, structure and function. The meeting was filled to capacity, with over 100 local participants. Presentations were piped all around the world using NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) infrastructure. The symposium had over 300 remote registrants from 26 countries. The talks were recorded and are permanently posted on the web (http://astrobiology.gatech.edu/suddath).

Each year the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech hosts the Suddath...

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Minimal catalytic and replicating systems

David Deamer
Department of Biomolecular Engineering
University of California Santa Cruz

Inouye and Orgel (1982) showed that strands of synthetic RNA could act as templates for polymerization of activated monoribonucleotides . For instance, when a polyC template was incubated with imidazole esters of guanosine monophosphate for several days at 4 degrees C, strands of oligoG up to 30mers were products. Furthermore, if the templates were heteropolymers, sequence information could be transferred from the template to the product strands. However, a complete cycle of replication could not be demonstrated. For instance, activated cytosine mononucleotide could not use a polyG template to...

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Call for Abstracts for the Next NAI "Workshop Without Walls" on Molecular Paleontology and Resurrection: Rewinding the Tape of Life

A three-day workshop using NAI remote communications tools will be held on November 8, 9 & 10, 2010. Participants will discuss ‘top down’ origin of life research, which will ultimately allow us to rewind the evolutionary record of biochemical processes and assemblies.

Organized by John Peters and Loren Williams, PIs of the NAI’s Montana State University and Georgia Tech teams, a primary goal of the workshop is to foster new interdisciplinary collaborations across the community.

Session topics will include

• Phylogenetic Studies on Key Enzymes Involved in Information Pathways and Metabolism
• The Evolutionary History of Protein Synthesis
• Minerals to Enzymes – Bridging the Gap...

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ISSOL and Bioastronomy Joint International Conference

Next year our community will hold the first joint conference of ISSOL and Bioastronomy. The meeting will take place at Montpellier in France on July 3-8, 2011. The Local Organizing Committee has found a wonderful venue and is doing a great job of putting together an exciting meeting, both culturally and scientifically. A stimulating interdisciplinary program will cover all main areas of bioastronomy and astrobiology, ranging from exoplanets to early life on Earth. In addition, the conference organizers are endeavoring to find travel funds for young scientists, to help bring “new blood” into our field. ISSOL has traditionally...

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2009 Nobel Prizes – The Origin of Life Connection

A number of Nobel Prize winners became actively interested in the origins of life at some point in their careers. Among them are Ernst Schrodinger, Jacques Monod, Harold Urey, Manfred Eigen, Christian de Duve, Albert Eschenmoser and Baruch Blumberg. This year, however, for the first time, two scientists who have already made important contributions to origins of life research received Nobel Prizes. They are Jack Szostak from Harvard Medical School and Ada Yonath from Weizmann Institute.

Jack Szostak received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on telomeres, conducted largely in the 1970’s and 80’s. ...

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Impressions from the San Sebastian meeting Open Questions in the Origin of Life (OQOL)

Pier-Luigi Luisi

The 2009 San Sebastian meeting on OQOL was the follow-up to an analogous meeting held in Erice, Sicily three years ago. The general idea was to identify and discuss the areas in the field that are still “in the darkness”, i.e. remain poorly understood despite their importance. We asked what were the reasons of our persisting ignorance, and what could we do to shed light on the “dark” areas. The meeting was not organized as a series of standard lectures (the usual “talk-and-run-away” format). Instead, it was centered on several selected questions, one per half-day, which were first...

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