The Rise of Oxygen

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We rely on these elements, molecules and purteins to enable everything. And that is, to me, one of the main reasons why we should study purteins, but also their evolution in deep time. So coming back to the rise of oxygen, we were able to see one of the prime drivers of this metablism to day. We were able to access its ancestry, access and resurrect it as three billion year old ancestors,. Then find out how the microbe responds to its own past and choose oxygen and carbon dioxide differently. It's almost like oxygen tickled the sporting and we can see these signatures on it. It's just so ranc that is pretty amazing.

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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