General information
Course type | AMUPIE |
Module title | What Is Life And Where Did It Come From? |
Language | EN |
Module lecturer | dr Maciej Szymański |
Lecturer's email | mszyman@amu.edu.pl |
Lecturer position | adiunkt |
Faculty | Faculty of Biology |
Semester | 2021/2022 (summer) |
Duration | 30 |
ECTS | 0 |
USOS code | xxx |
Timetable
Module aim (aims)
The problem of the origins of life is one of the greatest and most difficult questions of science. The efforts to solve the problem were initiated almost 100 by Oparin and Haldane who postulated that the increase of complexity of the prebiotic organic matter eventually gave rise to living cells. Currently, there are many, often conflicting, views on the nature of the processes that led from simple molecules to complex self-replicating systems and further to first autonomous primitive cells.
The aim of the course is to present an overview of various scientific problems related to the question of abiogenesis including the definition of life itself, conditions for life's origin, prebiotic synthesis of biological macromolecules, early evolution of chemical complexity, origins of metabolism and genetic systems and origins of self-replicating systems. These topics will be also discussed in the context of search for extraterrestrial life and efforts to create artificial life.
The comprehension of these topics, often crossing boundaries of scientific disciplines is essential for understanding various hypotheses presenting different scenarios accounting for various steps in the process of abiogenesis.
Pre-requisites in terms of knowledge, skills and social competences (where relevant)
Basic understanding of biology
Syllabus
Week 1: What is life? Troubles with the definition of life
Week 2: Historical perspective of the views on the origin of life from antiquity to modern times
Week 3: Life as we know it - properties of living matter on Earth
Week 4: The beginning - from the origin of the Universe to the young Earth
Week 5: Origins of life - the timeline
Week 6: Chemistry of life
Week 7: Setting the stage - conditions for the origin of the life on Earth
Week 8: Origins of life: metabolism first or genetics first controversy, chemical and biological evolution
Week 9: Oparin/Haldane hypothesis and prebiotic synthesis of biological molecules
Week 10: Wachtershauser’s Iron-Sulfur World
Week 11: Hydrothermal vents in the origin of life
Week 12: Origin of self-replicating molecules
Week 13: Origin of cells
Reading list
Paul Nurse, What is Life?: Five Great Ideas in Biology, WW Norton, New York, 2021
Andy Pross, What is Life? How Chemistry Becomes Biology, Oxford University Press, 2012
Pier Luigi Luisi, The Emergence of Life: From Chemical Origins to Synthetic Biology, Cambridge University Press, 2016