The Origin and Early Evolution of Cellularity

Abstract

Cellular organization arose sometime before the last universal common ancestor of life, and it remains a defining feature of all organisms across the modern biosphere. Despite its central role in biology, we understand very little about how cellularity first evolved following the origin of life. In this talk, I will describe several recent studies that explore the selection pressures that could have led to the emergence of cellularity and track the evolutionary history of the oldest cellular systems that are still conserved in organisms today.

Biography

My primary research interests revolve around the early history of life on Earth as understood from the perspective of molecular evolution. The evolutionary tree of life coalesces into a single root representing an ancestral population that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago. Many features of these ancestors are still buried within the genomes of organisms alive today, but evolution over billions of years has obscured the ancient signature of most of these features. Our lab takes advantage of the tremendous growth in genomic and proteomic data and the continued development of computational tools to find these ancient genes and protein, characterize their ancestral functions, and use them to understand what the very earliest organisms were like. If you would like to know more, please visit the Goldman lab website.