Date/Time
Date(s) - 26/02/2025
10:30 am - 11:30 am

Location
Physics and Astronomy Department

ABB 102

Dr. Joseph Moran

Professor
University of Ottawa
Profile link: https://www.uottawa.ca/faculty-science/professors/joseph-moran

Title: The Metabolic Origin of Life

Abstract:

Recreating an origin of life in the lab is essential for a deep understanding of biology. The Metabolism-First hypothesis for the origin of life posits that certain geochemical environments drove and facilitated dynamic organic reaction networks that were pruned and expanded through a series of emergent catalytic feedback effects. This process of self-complexification would lead to increasing catalytic autonomy of the reaction network from its original environment, ultimately resulting in the metabolic pathways found in chemoautotrophic organisms and a free-standing cell replete with catalysts for its own reactions. The advantage of this hypothesis is that it accounts for life’s specific chemical, catalytic and bioenergetic features. It also allows us to consider whether the origin of “genetic information” (i.e. sequence-specific polymers) was derived from cross-catalysis between the polymers produced by the metabolic network rather than from the self-replication of those polymers.

Our lab is searching for the specific conditions under which geochemistry might organize itself to recreate a metabolic origin of life. Experiments and calculations now point to an environment containing transition metals, an electrochemical redox gradient, strong electric fields, and a proton gradient. I propose that the combination of such features is most likely found in nanostructured mineral environments under electrochemical stress. Our experiments also suggest that small molecules, today known as coenzymes, were already able to participate in the process of catalytic feedback described above.