Is This a Major Ensim?

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The enzyme rubisco is thought to be one of the main ensims moving forward. We are now working on the older variants, so we want to go further away from the go great oxidation event and access the variants that we think existed when there was no oxygen on this planet. What makes rubisco interesting is that it's an old enzyme. It cannot oxygen from carbon dioxide very well. And perhaps maybe we are not better engineers or chemists than nature. Thats also an interesting angle here, that we are trying to revert the sansime to what it was before.

In the question to understand the biology of life, we are (so far) limited to what happened here on Earth. That includes the diversity of biological organisms today, but also its entire past history. Using modern genomic techniques, we can extrapolate backward to reconstruct the genomes of primitive organisms, both to learn about life’s early stages and to guide our ideas about life elsewhere. I talk with astrobiologist Betül Kaçar about paleogenomics and our prospects for finding (or creating!) life in the universe.

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Betül Kaçar received her PhD in biomolecular chemistry from Emory University. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also principal investigator of Project MUSE, a NASA-funded astrobiology research initiative and an associate professor (adjunct) at Earth-Life Science Institute of Tokyo Institute of Technology. Among her awards are a NASA Early Career Faculty Fellow in 2019, and a Scialog Fellow for the search for life in the universe.

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