Molecular Origins of Life, Munich 2020

Jul 8, 2020, 10:00 AM → Jul 10, 2020, 6:00 PM Europe/Berlin

Online

To the attention of registered attendees!

If you have not received an email from emergenceoflife@physik.uni-muenchen.de about the details of the event please contact us asap.

 

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The biannual Molecular Origins of Life, Munich addresses one of the most fundamental questions of science: How could life originate on Earth? With more than 20 lectures accompanied by discussion sessions and over 150 participants, this international conference brings together scientists from wide range of disciplines, namely: astrophysics, biochemistry, biophysics, chemistry, geobiology, geochemistry and theoretical physics. Only the combined effort from renowned experts from various disciplines can be successful in retracing the origins of life under experimental conditions and pave the way towards answering some of the most pertinent questions: What were the conditions on early Earth? Which chemicals could serve as precursors for the synthesis of living systems on Earth and on other planets? How did the very first genetic material in lifeforms develop? How could Darwinian evolution emerge? What were the first metabolic pathways? The conference's aim is to represent and to discuss the state of the art in the origin of life field.  

The Molecular Origins of Life, Munich 2020 is sponsored by DFG funded Collaborative Research Center 235 Emergence of Life and Origins Excellence Cluster.

Attendance to the conference is free of charge but registration is mandatory!

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Wednesday, July 8

1 Construction and Evolution of a Synthetic Cell

Speaker: Tetsuya Yomo (East China Normal University)

2 Reconstituting cytoskeletal systems in artificial cells

Speaker: Marileen Dogterom (TU Delft)

Session I: Panel Discussion

with Marileen Dogterom & Tetsuya Yomo

3 3D Presentation Rosetta-Philae – The Detection of Organic Molecules on the Surface of a Cometary Nucleus

Speaker: Uwe Meierhenrich (Institut de Chimie de Nice)

4 Traces of life in very old rocks – what is convincing and what not?

Speaker: Joachim Reitner (Georg-August-University of Goettingen)

Session II: Panel Discussion

5 Chemistry in Protoplanetary Disks

Speaker: Thomas Henning (MPI for Astronomy)

6 RNA Polymerization in Pre-biotic Environments: Experiments with the Planet Simulator McMaster's Origins of Life Laboratory

Speaker: Ralph Pudritz (McMaster University)

7 Reconstructing Prebiotic and Biotic Chemistry Using Molecular Isotopic Structures

Speaker: John Eiler (California Institute of Technology)

8 The role of zircon in the search for Earth’s earliest biosphere

Speaker: Elizabeth Bell (UC Los Angeles)

Thursday, July 9

9 Approaching Biological Complexity: Beyond Self-Assembly

Speaker: Jan van Esch (TU Delft)

10 Coacervate Dynamics and the Origin of Life

Speaker: Stephen Mann (University of Bristol)

11 Harnessing chemical energy for activation and joining of prebiotic building blocks

Speaker: Longfei Wu (MRC LMB, UK)

12 Shedding UV light on the common origins of RNA and DNA

Speaker: Rafal Szabla (University of Edinburgh)

13 The Sequence Space of Nonenzymatic RNA Copying

Speaker: Daniel Duzdevich (HHMI)

14 A Self-Assembly Approach to Uncovering Possible Ancestors of RNA

Speaker: Nicholas V. Hud (Georgia Institute of Technology)

15 Assembly of Functional Ribozyme from Short Oligomers by Enhanced Non-enzymatic Ligation

Speaker: Lijun Zhou (HHMI)

16 Asymmetric Amplification in Peptide-Catalyzed Formation of C4 Sugars from Nearly Racemic Amino Acids

Speaker: Donna Blackmond (Scripps Research)

Friday, July 10

17 How long ago was the Beginning? Looking for Life Signatures in ≥3.7 Billions-of-years-old Greenland Rocks

Speaker: Allen Nutman (University of Wollongong)

18 Quantifying the effects of abiotic H2 production on carbon metabolism in serpentinization systems

Speaker: William Orsi (Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich)

19 Prebiotic selection pressures shape the evolution of protocells

Speaker: Sudha Rajamani (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research)

20 Roadmap to building a cell

Speaker: Christophe Danelon (TU Delft)

21 Searching for early proteins in randomness

Speaker: Klára Hlouchová (Charles University in Prague)

22 Prebiotic Membranes Bind Protocell Building Blocks and Catalyze Formation of Biopolymers

Speaker: Roy A. Black (University of Washington)

23 Selection via Phase Separation

Speaker: Christoph Weber (MPI PKS)

24 Onset of natural selection in populations of autocatalytic heteropolymers

Speaker: Sergei Maslov (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)