We conduct science at the edge of disciplinary boundaries to understand of life on Earth and beyond. We develop innovative techniques to study the early evolution of life within a planetary context, revealing billion-year-old innovations that make our modern ecosystems possible.
Resurrected Rubisco suggests uniform carbon isotope signatures over geologic time
Constraining the timing of the Great Oxidation Event within the Rubisco phylogenetic tree
Earliest Photic Zone Niches Probed by Ancestral Microbial Rhodopsins
Reconstruction of Nitrogenase Predecessors Suggests Origin from Maturase-Like Proteins
Ancient nitrogenases are ATP dependent
Nitrogenase resurrection and the evolution of a singular enzymatic mechanism
Very early evolution from the perspective of microbial ecology
This work is funded by:
About 2.5 billion years ago there was a massive increase in oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere and we infer that these changes were, in part, being driven or governed by protein behavior.
We focus on proteins that are thought to be essential for early metabolisms and study how they may have changed themselves and how in turn this could have changed our environment. We rely on phylogenetic tree reconstructions to infer the evolutionary history of genes and proteins. To understand how the ancestral behavior of proteins and their host systems change through time, we are reconstructing key proteins that are involved in phenotypically distinct metabolic pathways that are of interest to biologists and geologists.
We combine paleobiology, cell biology and phylogenetics, to answer the question of whether the phenotypes we observe relate to larger scale changes in the global biogeochemical system.
Our planet’s past resembles an altogether alien planet. Sometimes what you are looking for is right in front of you. Why not benefit from our own strange and fascinating history and explore it together?
We collaboratively carry out geochemical and biological investigations that involve ancient materials, modern experiments, and exploration of past and present natural systems. Why does life rely heavily on certain metals, like iron, but not others like zirconium? Our research attempts turn back Earth’s clock to help answer this question. We retrace the path of element selection during the evolution of life on Earth, and better understand our planet’s unique form of life. We need to explore why life selected the metals that it did here, to understand how the elemental composition of other planets and moons can impact the chemistries in these bodies.
This work is funded by the
The majority of the key events in the earliest evolution of life seem to be truly singular: they happened only once, and never before or since has anything comparable happened again. Astrobiologists need to study these 'biological singularities' to have any hope of estimating or locating complex life in the universe. We explore life’s first innovations, and resurrect ancient molecules to shed light on such singularities.
Origins of hierarchical biotic structure and emergence
We assess empirical evidence of an emergent capability of goal-directedness across the abiotic-biotic transition, as reflected in the information decoding and error-correcting attributes of biotic translation, through the emergence and early evolution of the translation machinery.
Resurrecting biosignatures
When accessing the deep past, we have two main datasets to draw upon in reconstructing major transitions in the biosphere: the rock record (i.e., fossils, biosignatures and geologic indicators of environment) and extant biotic diversity (i.e., genetic sequences, proteins and organismal variability). Under this theme, we explore paleogenetic methodologies that allows us to reconstruct and then resurrect ancient protein sequences and utilize these modern tools for interpreting ancient biosignatures recorded in the rocks, and for shedding light on significant past events in evolution
We harness the potential of exciting and ancestral DNA sequence space. We take a similar approach to origins of life problem to Tesla’s approach to generate electricity. Try everything, and see what works without reference to environmental plausibility, and then back engineer the conditions. Can we do this with today’s biology/ biochemistry? Our goal is to modify and manipulate the modern systems (such as translation machinery, carbon and nitrogen cycle) with reconstructed ancestral homologs to recapitulate evolution.
This work is funded by
This work is funded by
Astrobiology is the study of where life is in the universe. Astrobiology is about figuring out whether conditions giving rise to life are rare, or whether these conditions are general and life is a universal case. Figuring out possible answers to this question lets engineers and scientists figure out how to design instruments to look for life beyond Earth.
We collaborate with astronomers, planetary scientists, and geologists to understand habitability and assist current and future life detection missions.
Nitrogenase Structural Database (NSDB):
A massive dataset of structural predictions for ancestral and extant nitrogenase sequences.
We are a diverse team of evolutionary biologists, geologists, synthetic biologists and more. We are committed to building new insights into the history and future of life in the universe.
