Aberdeen will host the inaugural UK Space Environments Conference - UK Research & Education for Space & Terrestrial Benefit. Leading UK and international researchers from the fields of space biomedicine, astrobiology, microgravity-physics and astrochemistry will present and discuss details of their work and plans for the future. Day one of the conference will be devoted to Space Biomedicine. The chairman and members of the Space Environments Working Group will present on day two. An open-house poster opportunity exists for any space related organization to present a poster of the details of their company and/or related activities. Registration is #91 (#67 for students) for two days of excellent content with lunch included on both days. For more information visit - http://www.uksba.org/conference
]]>The second Darwin Summer School on Biogeosciences will give PhD and advanced MSc students an update on the state-of-the-art research within the field of Biogeosciences. The focus will be ocean acidification, the carbon cycle, microbial ecology, biomarkers, terrestrial carbon cycling and climate reconstructions, in the past, present and future. This Summer School is all about interdisciplinary research. Students are expected to work on the interface of biology, earth sciences, chemistry and physics. More information and application: www.darwincenter.nl/dss
]]>In this one week program, scientists from the fields of planetary science, celestial mechanics, astronomy and astrophysics will meet to discuss new developments in the field of extrasolar multi-planet systems. Our workshop will provide an environment where these scientists can present new ideas, discuss their implications for identifying the most important problems in the field and chart the field's future direction.
The meeting will be held either February 9-15 or February 10-16, 2013. We anticipate nearly 100 participants. The Aspen Center for Physics will coordinate applications, registration and housing. We will update the meeting website with information as these details become available. See the ACP website for further information about registration, housing and day care for previous winter meetings. Young scientists, women and underrepresented minorities are all encouraged to apply.
Carbon fixation - life's mechanism for making carbon dioxide biologically useful - forms the biggest bridge between Earth's non-living chemistry and its biosphere. All organisms that fix carbon do so in one of six ways. These six mechanisms have overlaps, but it was previously unclear which of the six types came first, and how their development interweaved with environmental and biological changes.
The authors used a method that creates "trees" of evolutionary relatedness based on genetic sequences and metabolic traits. From this, they were able to reconstruct the complete early evolutionary history of biological carbon-fixation, relating all ways in which life today performs this function.
The earliest form of carbon fixation identified achieved a special kind of built-in robustness - not seen in modern cells - by layering multiple carbon-fixing mechanisms. This redundancy allowed early life to compensate for a lack of refined control over its internal chemistry, and formed a template for the later splits that created the earliest major branches in the tree of life. For example, the first major life-form split came with the earliest appearance of oxygen on Earth, causing the ancestors of blue-green algae and most other bacteria to separate from the branch that includes Archaea, which are outside of bacteria the other major early group of single-celled microorganisms.
"It seems likely that the earliest cells were rickety assemblies whose parts were constantly malfunctioning and breaking down," explains Smith. "How can any metabolism be sustained with such shaky support? The key is concurrent and constant redundancy."
]]> Once early cells had more refined enzymes and membranes, giving greater control over metabolic chemistry, minimization of energy (ATP) used to create biomass, changes in oxygen levels and alkalinity directed life's unfolding. In other words, the environment drove major divergences in predictable ways, in contrast to the common belief that chance dominated evolutionary innovation - and that rewinding and replaying the evolutionary tape would lead to an irreconcilably different tree of life."Mapping cell function onto genetic history gives us a clear picture of the physiology that led to the major foundational divergences of evolution," explains Braakman. "This highlights the central role of basic chemistry and physics in driving early evolution."
With the ancestral form uncovered, and evolutionary drivers pinned to branching points in the tree, the researchers now want to make the study more mathematically formal and further analyze the early evolution of metabolism.
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FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE: This work was supported in part by the NSF FIBR grant nr. 0526747 - The Emergence of Life: From Geochemistry to the Genetic Code. ES is further supported by Insight Venture Partners. RB is further supported by an Omidyar Fellowship. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
COMPETING INTERESTS: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
CITATION: Braakman R, Smith E (2012) The Emergence and Early Evolution of Biological Carbon-Fixation. PLoS Comput Biol 8(4): e1002455. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002455
PLEASE ADD THIS LINK TO THE FREELY AVAILABLE ARTICLE IN ONLINE VERSIONS OF YOUR REPORT (the link will go live when the embargo ends): http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002455
CONTACT: Rogier Braakman, Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Rd, Santa Fe, NM 87501, UNITED STATES Email: rogier@santafe.edu Telephone: 505-946-2787
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Specific topic areas were selected because they can best benefit from early stage innovative approaches provided by U.S. academic institutions. The research will investigate unique, disruptive or transformational space technologies or concepts.
"NASA is committed to ensuring our nation's intellectual capital pipeline remains the best in the world, and that we bring the brightest minds together with the best ideas to meet the challenges of NASA's future missions," said Michael Gazarik, Director of NASA's Space Technology Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "These grants offer a means for NASA to capitalize on the tremendous creativity and innovation that these brilliant individuals have to offer."
NASA expects to award approximately ten grants this fall, funded up to $200,000 each per year, based on the merit of proposals received. The deadline for submitting proposals is May 3. For information on the solicitation, including specific technology areas of interest and how to submit notices of intent and proposals, visit: http://go.usa.gov/P31
The Space Technology Research Opportunities for Early Career Faculty is a part of NASA's Space Technology Program, managed by the Office of the Chief Technologist. For more information about the Space Technology Program and the crosscutting space technology areas of interest to NASA, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/oct
Astrobiologists from NAI's team at the University of Wisconsin, Madison have recently published a study of drill cores obtained through the NAI-funded Archean Biosphere Drilling Project which sampled the 3.4 billion year old Apex Basalt from the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia. Their innovative approach directly dates oxidation products of the ancient rock, and they show that oxidation occurred in the Phanerozoic during deep weathering. Their results indicate that oxidation of the Apex Basalt did not occur in the Archean, and therefore cannot be used to infer an oxygenated atmosphere at that time. Their paper appears in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
]]>For the first third of the history of life on Earth, the atmosphere was devoid of the oxygen we breathe, supporting a dramatically different chemistry. A new study from a group including memembers of NAI's Virtual Planetary Laboratory Team suggests connections between Earth's atmosphere and its biosphere that induced an orange, hydrocarbon haze that would have blocked incoming sunlight and cooled the planet.
The study, published in Nature Geoscience, provides analyses of 2.5 billion year old rock cores from South Africa that reveal a series of unique chemical signatures of atmospheric change. When these data are plugged into atmospheric models, it is revealed that early Earth oscillated between two atmospheric states: one with a thin, orange haze and the other without any haze.
The trigger for these events appears to be atmospheric changes in a potent greenhouse gas, methane. These high concentrations of methane, produced by biological activity, caused the haze and an "anti-greenhouse" effect. This is one of the earliest examples of the tight climatic coupling between Earth and its inhabitants.
]]>In a recent study published in Meteoritics and Planetary Science, scientists from NAI's Goddard Space Flight Center Team analyzed samples from fourteen carbon-rich meteorites with minerals that indicated they had experienced high temperatures - in some cases, over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. They found amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins, used by life to speed up chemical reactions and build structures like hair, skin, and nails.
In one of the largest studies of its kind, described in the March 14 issue of Nature, a group of researchers led by David Johnston, Assistant Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, analyzed hundreds of samples of carbon-rich rock collected from sites in Canada, Mongolia, and Namibia. Their findings show that carbon isotope records from the mid-Neoproterozoic era -- between 717 million and 635 million years ago -- can be "read" as a faithful snapshot of the surface carbon cycle.