2018 December - 27 articles
A preliminary list of plausible near-surface minerals present during Earth’s Hadean Eon (>4.0 Ga) should be expanded to include: (1) phases that might have formed by precipitation of organic crystals prior to the rise of predation by cellula...
Ambrosia beetles, along with termites and leafcutter ants, are the only fungus-farming lineages within the tree of life. Bacteria harbored by ambrosia beetles may play an essential role in the nutritional symbiotic interactions with their associated...
Life is more than the sum of its constituent molecules. Living systems depend on a particular chemical organization, i.e., the ways in which their constituent molecules interact and cooperate with each other through catalyzed chemical reactions. Seve...
The acidic sulfate-rich waters of the Meridiani Planum region were potentially a habitable environment for iron-oxidizing bacteria on ancient Mars. If life existed in this ancient martian environment, jarosite minerals precipitating in these waters m...
In the filamentous cyanobacterium, Anabaena sp. PCC 7120, single heterocysts differentiate at semi-regular intervals in response to nitrogen stepdown. HetR is a principal regulator of heterocyst differentiation, and hetP and hetZ are two genes that a...
Adsorption of prebiotic building blocks is proposed to have played a role in the emergence of life on Earth. The experimental and theoretical study of this phenomenon should be guided by our knowledge of the geochemistry of the habitable early Earth...
Under nitrogen-poor conditions, multicellular cyanobacteria such as Anabaena sp. PCC 7120 undergo a process of differentiation, forming nearly regular, developmental patterns of individual nitrogen-fixing cells, called heterocysts, interspersed betwe...
Understanding how life began is one of the most fascinating problems to solve. By approaching this enigma from a chemistry perspective, the goal is to define what series of chemical reactions could lead to the synthesis of nucleotides, amino acids, l...
Minerals might have played critical roles for the origin and evolution of possible life forms on Mars. The study of the interactions between the “building blocks of life” and minerals relevant to Mars mineralogy under conditions mimicking...
How life began on Earth is still largely shrouded in mystery. One of the central ideas for various origins of life scenarios is Darwin’s “warm little pond”. In these small bodies of water, simple prebiotic compounds such as amino ac...
Membrane proteins are important drug targets which play a pivotal role in various cellular activities. However, unlike cytosolic proteins, most of them are difficult-to-express proteins. In this study, to synthesize and produce sufficient quantities...
Experimental evolution in chemical models of cells could reveal the fundamental mechanisms of cells today. Various chemical cell models, water-in-oil emulsions, oil-on-water droplets, and vesicles have been constructed in order to conduct research on...
2-oxoglutarate (α-ketoglutarate; 2-OG) is an intermediate of the Krebs cycle, and constitutes the carbon skeleton for nitrogen assimilation and the synthesis of a variety of compounds. In addition to being an important metabolite, 2-OG is a sig...
Glutamine synthetase (GS) features prominently in bacterial nitrogen assimilation as it catalyzes the entry of bioavailable nitrogen in form of ammonium into cellular metabolism. The classic example, the comprehensively characterized GS of enterobact...
We characterized the adsorption of triglycine molecules on a pyrite surface under several simulated environmental conditions by X-ray photoemission spectroscopy. The triglycine molecular adsorption on a pyrite surface under vacuum conditions (absence...
Studies that measured mutation rates in human populations using pedigrees have reported values that differ significantly from rates estimated from the phylogenetic comparison of humans and chimpanzees. Consequently, exchanges between mutation rate va...
The Strecker reaction of aldehydes with ammonia and hydrogen cyanide first leads to α-aminonitriles, which are then hydrolyzed to α-amino acids. However, before reacting with water, these aminonitriles can be trapped by aminothiols, such...
In the published article “How close we are to achieving commercially viable large-scale photobiological hydrogen production by cyanobacteria:[...]
Prebiotic organic synthesis catalyzed by Earth-abundant metal sulfides is a key process for understanding the evolution of biochemistry from inorganic molecules, yet the catalytic functions of sulfides have remained poorly explored in the context of...
Long term human missions to the Moon and Mars, rely on life support systems for food production and regeneration of resources. In the EU H2020 TIME SCALE-project, an advanced life support system concept was developed to facilitate plant research and...
One of the most intriguing questions in biological science is how life originated on Earth. A large number of hypotheses have been proposed to explain it, each putting an emphasis on different events leading to functional translation and self-sustain...
Propagation of genetic information is a fundamental prerequisite for living cells. We recently developed the replication cycle reaction (RCR), an in vitro reaction for circular DNA propagation, by reconstitution of the replication cycle of the Escher...
Mineral surfaces have been demonstrated to play a central role in prebiotic reactions, which are understood to be at the basis of the origin of life. Among the various molecules proposed as precursors for these reactions, one of the most interesting...
Rock–water–carbon interactions germane to serpentinization in hydrothermal vents have occurred for over 4 billion years, ever since there was liquid water on Earth. Serpentinization converts iron(II) containing minerals and water to magne...
In recent years, there has been a large increase in the amount of experimental evidence for diverse archaeal organisms, and these findings allow for a comprehensive analysis of archaeal genetic organization. However, studies about regulatory mechanis...
Recently, the construction of models for multicellular systems such as tissues has been attracting great interest. These model systems are expected to reproduce a cell communication network and provide insight into complicated functions in living sys...
In 2001, the first author (S.N.) led the publication of a book entitled “Geochemistry and the origin of life” in collaboration with Dr. Andre Brack aiming to figure out geo- and astro-chemical processes essential for the emergence of life...
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