The Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution (FfAME) announced the results of an international competition to award over $5 million to researchers who will advance our understanding of the origin of life. The awards were made possible under a grant by the John Templeton Foundation.

The awardees are:
• Prof. Stephen Mojzsis, from the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Prof. Mojzsis will lead a team of international scientists seeking to better constrain planetary environments on Earth 4 billion years ago, near the time when life emerged on Earth.

• Profs. Charles Carter, Rihe Liu, and Eric Brustad, of the Departments of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Chemical Biology & Medicinal Chemistry, and Chemistry, all at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their team will combine combinatorial chemistry and messenger RNA display to understand interaction between proteins and nucleic acids o n the early Earth.

• Prof. Andrew D. Ellington, of the Department of Molecular Biosciences at the University of Texas at Austin . Prof. Ellington’s team will develop nucleic acid replicators with standard and non -­‐ standard backbones.

• Prof. Dr. George E. Fox and Maxim Paci, of the Departments of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Houston. The Houston team will use dynamic combinatorial chemistry to develop an understanding of interactions between proteins and nucleic acids.

• Prof. Andrej Luptak, of the Departments of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Chemistry, and Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at the University of California at Irvine. Prof. Luptak will use compartmentalization and diversity science to developmulti-­turnover catalysis by RNA.

• Prof. Niles Lehman, of the Department of Chemistry at Portland State University. Prof. Lehman will work with Andrew Griffiths at the ESPCI Paris Tech, France, to understand the role of RNA-­RNA interactions in the emergence of an RNA world.

• In Alachua, Prof. Steven Benner and Hyo-­Joong Kim will develop the chemistry of mineral-­RNA interactions to join the work done under the direction of Prof. Mojzsis with work with nucleic acids and proteins in other laboratories, and to understand the scope of RNA catalysis.

Competitors were challenged to offer new ideas to resolve “paradoxes” in geology, chemistry, and biology that make the “origins” problem generally inaccessible to normal, hypothesis-­driven science. These include the apparent need for life to exist in water, coupled by the fact that molecules like RNA are degraded in water. Further, experience in the laboratory and the kitchen show that when energy is put into organic material, it devolves to give disorganized tars, not Darwinian systems. A third relates to the difficulty of getting productive catalysts without getting unproductive catalysts. “Standard research to understand the origins of life have generally avoided confronting these problems,” remarked Steven Benner, Distinguished Fellow at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, which is managing the project. “These international teams will work together to combine the best geology, the best nucleic acid chemistry, the best protein science, and the latest instrumentation, to move the field beyond the point where we are ‘casting about’ to stumble across clues to life’s origins”.