Molecular Origins of Life, Munich 2025

Jul 16, 2025, 10:50 AM → Jul 18, 2025, 4:45 PM Europe/Berlin

Online

How did life emerge? The Molecular Origins of Life, Munich conference brings together leading scientists from diverse disciplines—including astrophysics, biochemistry, biophysics, chemistry, geosciences, and theoretical physics—to explore this fundamental question. This year, the conference will be held online, featuring expert talks accompanied by meet the speaker slots and virtual poster sessions. It provides a unique opportunity for researchers to exchange ideas, foster collaborations, and engage with the international Origins of Life community. The Molecular Origins of Life, Munich 2025 is organized and sponsored by the DFG funded Collaborative Research Center 392 Molecular Evolution in Prebiotic Environments and the attendance to the event is free of charge.

 

📌 Registration is required:

• Should you like to receive access to the Virtual Poster Session the registration deadline is Sunday, July 13th.

• To attend the talks and discussions, registration is open until the conference begins.

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Poster_A3.pdf

Wed, July 16

10:50 AM → 11:00 AM Welcome Note

11:00 AM → 12:30 PM Session I

11:00 AM TBA

Speaker: Philipp Holliger (MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology)

11:30 AM TBA

Speaker: Henrike Niederholtmeyer (TU Munich)

12:00 PM Meet the Speakers - Session I

12:30 PM → 2:00 PM Session II

12:30 PM TBA

Speaker: Dora Tang (MPI of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics)

1:00 PM TBA

Speaker: Marcel Hollenstein (Institut Pasteur)

1:30 PM Meet the Speakers - Session II

2:00 PM → 3:00 PM Lunch Break

3:00 PM → 4:30 PM Session III

3:00 PM TBA

Speaker: Matthew Pasek (University of South Florida, School of Geoscience)

3:30 PM TBA

Speaker: Jasna Brujic (New York University)

4:00 PM Meet the Speakers - Session III

4:30 PM → 6:00 PM Session IV

4:30 PM TBA

Speaker: Ulrich Müller (UC San Diego)

5:00 PM Physical and Chemical Models for the Emergence of Biological Homochirality

The single chirality of the amino acids and sugars that make up the building blocks of life has fascinated scientists and laymen alike since Pasteur’s first painstaking separation of the enantiomorphic crystals of a tartrate salt over 150 years ago. In the past several decades, a number of theoretical and experimental investigations have helped to delineate models for how one enantiomer might have come to dominate over the other from what presumably was a racemic prebiotic world. Our work has highlighted mechanisms that include either chemical or physical processes, or a combination of both. While much of the scientific driving force for this work arises from an interest in understanding the origin of life, research focusing on mechanisms for the enantioenrichment of chiral molecules has the potential to impact a wide range of applications, most notably in the synthesis and formulation of pharmaceuticals.

Speaker: Donna Blackmond (Scripps Research)

5:30 PM Meet the Speakers - Session IV

6:00 PM → 7:00 PM Poster Session I

Thu, July 17

10:00 AM → 11:00 AM Poster Session II

11:00 AM → 12:30 PM Session V

11:00 AM TBA

Speaker: Yuichiro Ueno (Science Tokyo, ELSI (Earth-Life Science Institute))

11:30 AM TBA

Speaker: Corinna Kufner (Leibniz-IPHT)

12:00 PM Meet the Speakers - Session V

12:30 PM → 2:00 PM Session VI

12:30 PM A short history of cellular life on Earth

The tree of life (TOL) is a powerful framework to depict the evolutionary history of cellular organisms through time, from the last universal common ancestor, LUCA, to extant archaea, bacteria and eukaryotes shaping biodiversity on Earth today.
During the past decades, our perception of the TOL has fundamentally changed in part due to profound methodological advances which allowed a more objective approach to study organismal diversity and led to the discovery of major new branches in the TOL. For example, single cell and metagenomics approaches to reconstruct genomes of uncultivated microorganisms, has enabled the generation of a wealth of genomic data of previously unknown microbial such as the ubiquitous and diverse symbiotic DPANN archaea and CPR bacteria as well as shed new insights into the origin of the eukaryotic cell from a symbiosis between an Asgardarchaeon and alphaproteobacterial partner.
In this talk, I will present aspects of our research that have contributed to new key insights into the divergence of archaea and bacteria, the placement of genome-reduced symbionts in the TOL and the timing of major evolutionary transitions including the origin of the eukaryotic cell.

Speaker: Anja Spang (Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ))

1:00 PM TBA

Speaker: James Saenz (TU Dresden, B CUBE Center for Molecular Bioengineering)

1:30 PM Meet the Speakers - Session VI

2:00 PM → 3:00 PM Lunch Break

3:00 PM → 4:30 PM Session VII

3:00 PM TBA

Speaker: Frieder Klein (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

3:30 PM TBA

Speaker: Daniel Duzdevich (University of Chicago)

4:00 PM Meet the Speakers - Session VII

4:30 PM → 6:00 PM Session VIII

4:30 PM TBA

Speaker: Irene Chen (UCLA)

5:00 PM TBA

Speaker: Arvind Murugan (University of Chicago)

5:30 PM Meet the Speakers - Session VIII

6:00 PM → 7:00 PM Poster Session III

Fri, July 18

10:00 AM → 11:00 AM Poster Session IV

11:00 AM → 12:30 PM Session IX

11:00 AM TBA

Speaker: Kosuke Fujishima (Science Tokyo, ELSI (Earth-Life Science Institute))

11:30 AM TBA

Speaker: Takumi Okuda (Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg)

12:00 PM Meet the Speakers - Session IX

12:30 PM → 2:00 PM Session X

12:30 PM TBA

Speaker: Alexey Potapov (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena)

1:00 PM TBA

Speaker: Paul Higgs (McMaster University)

1:30 PM Meet the Speakers - Session X

2:00 PM → 3:00 PM Lunch Break

3:00 PM → 4:30 PM Session XI

3:00 PM TBA

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

3:30 PM TBA

Speaker: Zoe Todd (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

4:00 PM Meet the Speakers - Session XI

4:30 PM → 4:45 PM Goodbye Note