The Translation Machinery of Life

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We all rely on a translation machinery. It is almost imagining that we all have the same computational processor inside of us. A life needs to translate the language of d and a into hoply meaningful, sometimes meaningless, protain sequences. And so if i look in the dana of a bacterium or a fungus, can i literally identify sequences of base pairs that also appear in human diana? No,. there there are segments that in an old a, an old modern life to day that that shared writes o there are components that are shared.

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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