Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets (ASTEP)

XV International Conference on the Origin of Life – a Personal Perspective

XV International Conference on the Origin of Life was held in beautiful Florence on August 24-29, 2008. There were two types of oral presentations at the meeting – 45 min or 1 h invited lectures and 15 min contributed talks. There were also very extensive poster sessions. Oral presentations were divided along traditional thematic lines. The first session was devoted to planetary evolution and the habitat for early life. Current views on the formation of planetary system were comprehensively reviewed...

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September 26, 2008 / Written by: Andrew Pohorille

AbSciCon '08: Second Meeting of the Origins of Life Focus Group

The meeting took place on April 17, 2008 during the AbSciCon 2008 in Santa Clara, California. 38 scientists participated in this meeting. As previously, this report summarizes main conclusions not only from the meeting, but also from a number of conversations that I had with members of the Group during the conference.

The agenda consisted of four items:

• A brief report on the upcoming ISSOL meeting in Florence.
• Report from my presentation on our focus group to the NAI Executive...

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May 5, 2008 / Written by: Andrzej Pohorille

Leslie Orgel (1927-2007)

In 1964 Leslie Orgel joined The Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla as a Senior Fellow. Prior to that time he was Assistant Director of Research in Theoretical Chemistry at Cambridge University, where he developed ligand-field theory as a means to understand the properties of transition metal complexes. Based on that work he was elected a Fellow of The Royal Society at the unusually young age of...

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Potential Origin of Primordial Protein Enzymes

Life on earth is facilitated by a multitude of enzymes that catalyze essential chemical reactions. The vast majority of today’s enzymes are proteins, yet looking at the complex and intricate structures of natural enzymes it is hard to imagine how the first enzymes emerged.

However, new experiments by Seelig and Szostak, show that small, simple enzymes can evolve rather easily. In the August 16, 2007 issue of Nature, they describe the generation of an...

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