CLOE SPRING SYMPOSIUM-Origins of genes, proteins and animals

Dear All

The CLOE Spring Symposium 'Origins of genes, proteins and animals' will be held on April 23rd, 2pm-4pm in the JZ Young LT, Med & Anatomy Building.

This seminar is open to all regardless of career stage. Please share details with colleagues, wider networks and those who may be interested.

The speakers will be

Dr Stephen Pates, Uni of Exeter & soon to be UCL
Title: The origin of animals: a view from fossil records
The origin of animals was one of the most important evolutionary events in the history of life on Earth. The soft-bodied, shelly, trace, small-carbonaceous and small-shelly fossil records provide complementary data documenting the origination and evolution of animals during the Ediacaran-Cambrian transition (~575-500 million years ago). Here I review evidence for the origins and dynamics of the evolution of stem and crown group metazoans and individual phyla in light of expectations from molecular clocks and birth-death models, and evaluate the extent to which our fossil records provide a complete picture of the origin of animals and animal phyla.

Dr Stuart Harrison, UCL
Title: A biophysical basis for the emergence of the genetic code
Attempts to understand how life on earth emerged entails the investigation of multiple different questions – how the first biomolecules got made, how does the chemistry of life begin in the absence of enzymes and what were the first RNA and/or proteins structures? Perhaps the single most important question in this field though is how genetic information first emerged; how does a chemical system transition to one capable of true Darwinian evolution. Central to this question is the emergence of the genetic code, a near-universal cipher that is used to translate genetic information into a tangible, useful, catalytic form as proteins.
Attempts to explain the emergence of the genetic code currently defy clear explanation, yet there are mysterious hints to its origins in “patterns” retained in its structure to this day. A reanalysis of these patterns in the context of a protometabolic model of the origins of life reveals a tantalising logic to the genetic code. It suggests a combination of 1) biophysical interactions between short RNA hairpins and amino acids and 2) the stage of chemical evolution in which these interactions took place can reproduce the genetic code in almost its entirety. This hypothesis is currently being investigated with early results showing promising indications.

Dr Claudia Alvarez Carreno, UCL
Title: The history of folding proteins from early life until today
The origins and early evolution of folding proteins remain a profound and unresolved question in biology. Despite growing access to protein sequence and structural data, our understanding of protein structure evolution is still incomplete. How did nature first discover folding proteins more than three billion years ago? And how do new folding proteins continue to emerge in contemporary biology? With over 200 million protein structures now predicted by AlphaFold and ESMFold, we are closer than ever to answering these fundamental questions.
Folds are the structural units of folded proteins, and each type of fold is thought to have a unique evolutionary origin. At the same time, the universe of protein folds is highly interconnected, with local sequence similarities linking structurally distinct folds. These connections reveal deep evolutionary relationships that provide insights into the origins of protein folds, the emergence of new structural architectures, and the evolutionary forces shaping protein structures over time.
Sequence and structure capture different aspects of a fold’s evolutionary history. Here, we present a model for the genesis of new folds at the dawn of life, focusing on some of the oldest, simplest, and most ubiquitous folds in biology. However, fold emergence appears to be an ongoing process, continuing to shape the protein universe today.

There will be a reception after the symposium in the Haldane Student Hub

Thank you

Muslima Chowdhury
Centre Assistant 
Institute of Healthy Ageing and the Centre for Life's Origins & Evolution
Genetics, Evolution and Environment