While it has been long supposed that asteroids played a role in the delivery of important prebiotic compounds to early Earth, the exact nature of the interactions between asteroidal material […]
The origin of eukaryotes is one of the key problems in evolutionary biology. The demonstration that the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA) already contained the mitochondrion—an endosymbiotic organelle derived from […]
Keith’s note: A quick snapshot of the weather at Lake Untersee and A forecast for the coming week. Dale’s team has a small Ambient WS-4000 weather station set up near […]
Biofilms are intricately associated with life on Earth, enabling functions essential to human and plant systems, but their susceptibility to spaceflight stressors and functional disruption in space remains incompletely understood. […]
Synthetic communication networks are key to engineering life-like behaviors in artificial cells. Inspired by natural quorum sensing, we developed a coacervate-based system that exhibits quorum-sensing-like communication, driven by an autocatalytic […]
By resurrecting a 3.2-billion-year-old enzyme and studying it inside living microbes, researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have created a new way to improve our understanding of the origins of […]
Direct chemical synthesis and chemical evolution are conceptually different models for the prebiotic origin of RNA and other biopolymers. These models generate distinct predictions and motivate different experimental approaches.
RNA-catalyzed assembly of RNA strands was one of the most essential enzymatic functions in a primordial RNA-based biology.
Modern cells are complex chemical entities with cytoskeletons, finely regulated internal and external molecules, and genetic material that determines nearly every aspect of their functioning. This complexity allows cells to […]
The asteroid that struck the Earth 66 million years ago devastated life across the planet, wiping out the dinosaurs and other organisms in a hail of fire and catastrophic climate […]
