Institute for Advanced Study/Princeton University Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

From the first networks of organic reactions in the Hadean to the molecular complexity of life today, evolution encountered many hurdles, corresponding to transition points from a proto-metabolism to polymers, from polymers to networks capable of information replication, from replicating networks to membrane-bounded compartments, from proto-cells to equal cell division. Along this path, life appears to have emerged from interdependent networks of RNA and peptides, and achieved considerable complexity before it made the transition to the DNA-protein world observed today. In this talk I will review some of these transition points, with a special emphasis on the transition from the RNA-peptide to the DNA-protein world, which we study computationally and experimentally.