Smith Lecture: Molecular Memories of Earth’s Antiquity

Zoom Meeting ID# 986 8692 2782
Every cell contains a biochemical record of four billion years of Earth-life coevolution. Our mitochondria were once free-living bacteria. Each unit of the electron transport chain that we use to breathe oxygen was borrowed from older microbial machinery. Aerobic respiration is a medley of pieces of older anaerobic respiratory pathways such as methanogenesis and denitrification. Yet we have barely begun to chart the vast landscape of myriad microbial metabolisms. In this talk, I will describe how dissecting the molecular machines of modern microbes can give us glimpses of the early Earth environments that supported life’s first breaths.