We have a Special Seminar scheduled for the next Tuesday, November 26, from 2:00 pm till 3:00 pm in the Division Room. Dr. Olga Taran Iourova (Whitesides Group) will tell us about her work in the Origins of Life. This area is relatively new for the group and we are currently building up a collaborative effort to merge theory and computations from our side with Olga's experimental research. I hope to see you on Tuesday. The abstract follows

Best,

Dmitry 

As chemists, we see life as network of chemical reactions. What chemicals and reaction conditions were necessary to start these reactions? How complex did the initial reaction network need to be to become “alive”? To answer these questions we study “Chemical Fossils” - small simple molecules common to all living cells, which might be remnants of prebiotic chemistry embedded in our biochemistry, just like real fossils are remains of previous life embedded in rocks. We are looking for these “Fossils”, tracing their plausible prebiotic geochemical origins, and using them to build simple reaction networks. To illustrate this approach I will talk about two ongoing projects from our lab: the potassium-sodium gradient and redox cofactors.