Kate Adamala: Synthetic life

Professor of genetics at the University of Minnesota.

Katarzyna AdamalaHer pioneering work as founder of the international Build-a-Cell Initiative has brought building of non-living life into a deeper theoretical and experimental reality, with the perspective of “teleportation” of synthetic “biological” material for example between Earth and potential future colonies on Mars. Her lab experiments opened an experimental basis for the RNA world hypothesis of the origin of life.

Kate Adamala's professional web-page

Abstract: The earliest history of life on any planet includes a series of transitions from non-living matter, through prebiotic synthesis, towards the first living cell. Those transitions leave no witnesses or fossil records. With modern biology representing only a single sample of possible life, it is difficult to speculate how those earliest stages of evolution looked like, and what other possible life forms could have existed on ours and other planets. The emerging field of synthetic cell engineering allows us, for the first time, to directly interrogate those questions. We now have the opportunity to interrogate other possible trees of life, elucidating other ways in which chemistry can become biology.