Origin of Life Seminar

When December 8, 2008 (Mon) ~

Where Virtual

November 17, 2008 / Posted by: Estelle Dodson

Please join us for the next Forum for Astrobiology Research (FAR) seminar held on Monday, December 8th at 11:00am PT (9:00am HT, 12:00pm MT, 1:00pm CT, 2:00pm ET). This seminar is broadcast live by NAI – you can “attend” locally from a videoconferencing room or from your desktop (see instructions below). Please join us to hear presentations on “Origin of Life: The Only Way Around Is Through” by Marina António of Washington State University and “The Error Threshold in the Prebiotic World” by Irene Chen of Harvard University.

Titles, abstracts and connection information are below. Attendance is open to the entire community.

Origin of Life: The Only Way Around Is Through
Marina Antonio

Countless attempts to reconstitute the past in order to understand the context of the origin of life have been made. Although these attempts are unarguably amongst the most impressive in the history of science, we are still failing to reproduce it or even identify all the variables involved.

We have been trying to go around life, mechanistically decomposing life processes into its fundamental parts; we disassemble it, and then try to put it back together, a bottom up approach. But what if we tried to go through life in order to understand it?

What is life fined tuned to? Where does its strength lie and what triggers it? Can life oasis hold the answer we have been looking for?

The Error Threshold in the Prebiotic World
Irene Chen

The replication of biological information is essential for living systems. How much information could have been encoded in prebiotic replication? The error rate imposes a theoretical limit on the amount of information that can be faithfully propagated (Eigen’s error threshold). We describe this threshold in a realistic prebiotic scenario and use experimental models of nucleic acid replication to estimate the maximum length of a genome.

Participation Instructions:

To participate using a videoconferencing system such as Polycom….RSVP to Estelle Dodson (Estelle.dodson@nasa.gov) and connect to WebEx as instructed below. If you need videoconferencing help during the live event, you may post a chat to Estelle Dodson in WebEx.

The slides from the seminar can be accessed real-time using WebEx at:

https://nasa.webex.com

Enter the meeting number: 922 897 601. Hit the “join now” button.

Enter your name or site name (this is not an assigned log-in name, please use your institution name or your first and last name), email and the password: FAR*2008 (case sensitive)

If you’ve never joined a WebEx meeting before, please allow an extra 5-10 minutes to install the plug-in.

Without a room based videoconferencing system, there are two ways you can participate from your desktop:

1) you can listen to the seminar on the telephone while viewing the slides in WebEx (see WebEx instructions above). The NASA conference phone number will be displayed when joining WebEx.

2) you can watch the audio and video of the presentation using Realmedia player at http://vanseg-1.arc.nasa.gov/2008/AB081208-01.ram. You will need to use WebEx to view the slides (see instructions above). There will be a 30-second delay with Realmedia, so you will need to manually advance the slides in WebEx.

Do not use the telephone connection and Realmedia at the same time as the audio will interfere with each other.

Nov 23, 2008

Lisa C.Q. Holmstrom said:

Hello!
I am teaching a high school course in Astrobiology in Sweden,and would like to involve my students in the upcoming virtual seminars. Is there anything particular I need to do in order for my students to be able to listen/see these seminars? Aside from having access to computers and the website, that is.
Thank you in advance,
Lisa Holmstrom