Ideas Lab workshop on the origin of life

University Of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

National Science Foundation and National Aeronautics and Space Administration will sponsor an `Ideas Lab` workshop that will examine the problem of the Origin of Life from the scientific point of view. This 5-day, intensive, interactive and free-thinking activity involves thirty participants from diverse disciplines within the natural sciences. It aims to stimulate promising new research ideas that address a challenge central to understanding Life`s origins, namely the buildup of a two-polymer system - nucleic acids that encode genetic information and proteins that catalyze almost all biochemical reactions in the living systems. Participants will be expected to engage with each other under the guidance of a director and four mentors, in order to develop collaborative research proposals that will then compete for 7-10 major research awards from NASA and the NSF over the next 12 months. A central challenge in understanding Life`s origins is to work out a detailed scenario of the emergence of interdependent, two-polymer system (polymerized nucleotides and polymerized amino acids) on which contemporary life on Earth relies. Most theories of the origin and early evolution of life align with one of two different models. "Metabolism first" approaches generally focus on non-biological sources for the reactions of metabolism and rarely discuss in detail how genetically encoded proteins arose to catalyze them. "RNA World" models study the emergence of ribozymes (polymerized nucleotides that function as both gene and metabolic catalyst simultaneously), but struggle to describe in detail how and why proteins (polymerized amino acids) took over the metabolic role. Research to bridge these two perspectives closer together will go far to identifying plausible pathways for the origin of life, which will contribute directly to our understanding of the indispensable properties of life on Earth and inform our search for life on other worlds. This workshop aims to address two specific problems withing the `Origins` research community, i.e., under-participation by women and by early career scientists. The effort will be made to correct these disbalances during the workshop itself, and, in a longer-term effort, through emphasizing the broader impact activities in the collaborative proposals that the participants of the workshop will be expected to develop in order to compete for the ~$8 million in research funding over the ensuing year.