NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI)

Impressions from the San Sebastian meeting Open Questions in the Origin of Life (OQOL)

Pier-Luigi Luisi

The 2009 San Sebastian meeting on OQOL was the follow-up to an analogous meeting held in Erice, Sicily three years ago. The general idea was to identify and discuss the areas in the field that are still “in the darkness”, i.e. remain poorly understood despite their importance. We asked what were the reasons of our persisting ignorance, and what could we do to shed light on the “dark” areas. The meeting was not organized as a series of standard lectures (the usual “talk-and-run-away” format). Instead, it was centered on several selected questions, one per half-day, which were first...

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Energy Transduction Inside of Amphiphilic Vesicles

David P. Summers, SETI Institute

Many now look beyond theories for the origin of life that rely solely on a “prebiotic soup” (capable of supporting complex “protobiochemical” reaction, particularly in open bodies of water) and have started examining the role of various structures that might have aided the necessary, complex chemistry. Vesicles, water filled membranes made up of amphiphilic compound such as lipids, are one type of structures that have been particularly promising. The membrane of the vesicle, which is somewhat similar to modern cellular membranes, encloses a sample of aqueous solution and could have contained water-soluble species,...

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Titan First

Robert Shapiro (New York University) and Dirk Schulze-Makuch (Washington State University)

The Titan Saturn System Mission is planned to consist of a NASA orbiter, an ESA lander and a research balloon. Artist's image shows lander on one of Titan's hydrocarbon lakes with Saturn in the background.

We have written a paper “The Search for Alien Life in Our Solar System: Strategies and Priorities” which is now on line http://www.liebertonline.com/toc/ast/0/0 and will soon appear in Issue #4 (2009) of Astrobiology. We argue that Titan should be given the highest priority in the search for existing alien life in our Solar System, followed by Mars and Europa in that order. In setting priorities, we assume that economic constraints may limit existing space agencies to only one new multi-billion dollar planetary exploration mission, comparable to...

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Comment on Titan First

Andrew Pohorille (NASA-Ames)

Membranous vesicles that self-assemble in water from soap-like molecules extracted from the Murchison carbonaceous meteorite (courtesy of David Deamer). Besides water only very few other liquids have some capabilities to promote the formation of boundary structures.

In their recent, interesting paper, Robert Shapiro and Dirk Schulze-Makuch argue that Titan is the best target to search for indigenous alien life. The essence of their argument is that the environment on Titan is particularly conducive to rich organic, carbon-based chemistry. I agree that this, indeed, appears to be the case. Abundance of organic compounds, however, does not imply the existence of life or even a possibility of the emergence of life.

To become animated, organic matter has to separate itself from the environment and self-organize into functional structures capable of responding to environmental changes...

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The state of Astrobiology: From the President of the International Society for Studying the Origins of Life (ISSOL)

As the incoming president for the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life, I was asked several months ago to offer my opinion of the state of Astrobiology. It’s taken me those several months to decide what I thought would be important to convey, to the researchers who have been a part of this field before there were viable funding initiatives, to the fresh new, young converts to Astrobiology, or to those considering joining the astrobiology movement. Before I offer my opinion, it might help to understand the context in which I will be offering...

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Emergence in Chemical Systems Conference June 22-26 University of Alaska, Anchorage

When June 22, 2009 (Mon) ~ June 26, 2009 (Fri)

Where Alaska, USA

The spontaneous increase of complexity, from nucleons to atoms to compounds to cells to organism and society, is a basic property of nature. It involves the continuous creation of new entities and processes. The subject of this conference is to try to understand this drive to increase complexity and to creatively participate in the process.

The conference sections are:
Constructing Chemical Complexity
Transition from Non-living to Living Matter
Complex Networks of Physical and Chemical Processes
What Chemical Systems can do?

Source: [Link]

March 25, 2009 / Posted by: Yael Kovo

Origin of life research in El Centro de Astrobiologia

El Centro de Astrobiologia, located near Madrid, Spain, is the only fully autonomous center of astrobiology in the world, with its own building, full-time faculty and students. It was also the first international partner of the NAI.

by Cesar Menor Salvan menorsc@inta.es

We could define prebiotic evolution as the first step in the emergence of life; it includes all the natural physicochemical processes that occur in a given planetary environment from its formation until the emergence of the first self-replicating system on which Darwinian processes could operate. In the Centro de Astrobiología (CAB), we are interested in chemical...

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