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《紅樓夢》有什麼文學價值

《紅樓夢》有什麼文學價值， 我對那些看不懂紅樓夢的人我感到百思不得其解，紅樓夢裡的語言是清朝的表達形式，基本上已經接近白話文了，有什麼看不明白的，除了寶玉弔唁晴雯和探春寫的邀請寶玉建立詩社的較為正式的書面形式和格式的文本要稍微難點， 還有皇帝的詔書和在正式場合用的官方文件和書信要費一點周折外，基本的語言結構和寓意都很趨於直白，和我們現在的語言相差不是特別的大，完全沒有閱讀障礙，隨便摘錄一段大家看看有什麼難處，就拿紅樓夢的開頭有段話， 我堂堂須眉，誠不若彼裙釵。我實愧則有餘，悔又無益，大無可如何之日也！當此日，欲將已往所賴天恩祖德錦衣紈褲之時，飫甘饜肥之日，背父兄教育之恩，負師友規訓之德，以致今日一技無成，半生潦倒之罪，編述一集，以告天下。 哪句難了？簡直就是和我們聊天一樣的清晰明了，我一個堂堂男子漢還不如那些女孩子，我真正感覺太慚愧了後悔又沒有用，已經到了實在不知道該怎麼辦的時候了，那麼就將我以前什麼什麼之時，什麼什麼之日，背什麼之恩，負什麼什麼的之德，導致我今天什麼什麼之罪，編輯講述成集，廣而告之天下芸芸眾生。 我想一個國中生這樣的語文閱讀能力都可以閱讀下去，更何況有繁難的字詞句現在都可以上網查詢，根本就沒有什麼難度，你只要想讀就沒有讀不明白的地方，實在是看不明白就一小段一小段的讀懂再朝前面推進，愚公移山的故事我想很多人都知道吧，一天搞懂半章總可以了吧，何愁紅樓夢不​​被你讀懂。況且很多的時候都是在描述賈府人物的各類生活中的事情語言就更直白，沒有讀不下去的道理。 紅樓夢的文學價值之高是不言而喻的有兩點可以作為支撐，第一，中國四大名著西遊記，三國演義，水滸傳，紅樓夢只有紅樓夢有紅學說明什麼，說明它在四大名著中獨佔鰲頭，第二，一代偉人毛澤東反覆閱讀各種版本的紅樓夢，並說不讀紅樓夢三四遍就沒有發言權，並且在各種會議上多次號召幹部和黨員閱讀紅樓夢，足以說明紅樓夢在中國文學上的地位和價值，當然包括它的文學價值。 紅樓夢的文學價值是每個人都可以在那裡找到你想要的東西，是百科全書 你沒有見過的東西，令你驚奇的，恍然大悟的，令你關心快樂，令你淌眼抹淚的東西。這個淌眼抹淚就是紅樓夢慣用的字彙。各種思想層面的東西，包含的學科和知識面幾乎是包羅萬象，它簡直就是集中國文化之大成的用文學形式表現出來的一部百科全書。 你隨便說個種類和麵向它基本上都有，當然和現在的高科技方面的知識是沒有的，但中國在清朝以前的所有幾乎是全方位的知識都通過文學的形式表現了出來，戲劇表演，精美建築，精細烹飪，各色人物的服裝，室內室外的裝潢，糕點果盤，琴棋書畫，人文地理，天上人間，詩詞歌賦，職場技能，人情世故，花草山石的設計，藥理知識，奇珍異寶，衣食住行無所不有。 紅樓夢給人讀不懂的感覺其實很多是沒有細心去讀，因為人物較多關係輩分要慢慢才能理清楚，你可以畫一張圖來讀紅樓夢，從寶玉和黛玉，賈母開始，每出現一個人就註明他們之間的關係，例如賈母有幾個兒女，寶玉有幾個姊妹和弟弟，生的和死去的都寫明，黛玉家是怎麼一個組成的。 寶玉的女孩是哪些，各個主要人物的身邊的人有哪些，慢慢的你就可以搞清所有人之間的關係和習慣用語，還是那句話你想看懂，你想要做好一件事一定可以做到你能夠做到的最好，紅樓夢的語言遠不是之乎者曰這樣的語言結構，遠比孔子諸子的書好懂得多，對吧。 正像魯迅先生說的經學家看見《易》，道學家看見淫, 才子看見纏綿，革命家看見排滿，流言家看見宮闈秘事……在我的眼下的寶玉，卻看見他看見許多死亡；就說明宮閨秘事……在我的眼下的寶玉，卻看見他看見許多死亡；就說明了紅樓夢的博大精深，像一面鏡子照射出各種人物內心世界的感悟。這不就是紅樓夢的文學價值嗎？可以撼動各路諸侯的心魂。 而作為我們這些凡夫俗子看到了就只有賈母的寬厚和仁愛。有玉皇大帝的位尊又有王母娘娘的慈祥和厚愛，看到寶玉的視天下所有的女子情同手足，不管你是小姐還還下人丫環。他的眼裡和大腦裡是世界大同的烏托邦世界，是夏娃亞當幸福生活的伊甸園，是與世無爭，和平共處，按需分配的共產主義的提前實現，其實他就是在這樣的環境中長大的， 文學的價值就在於你創造的人物和發生的事件會長存在人們或歷史的記憶中，達到不滅，表現手法就是都有人生的平衡點 曹雪芹筆下的每個人都有鮮明的個性，和多種品行，都有不同的展示，賈母在聽到說書人的開頭就知道戲本的發展套路，公子小姐王公貴族有一種模式的劇情發展在紅樓夢裡就不是這樣，許多的猜不透和懸念直到看完紅樓夢都依然是個迷， 曹雪芹把一個人所擁有的各種擁有加以平衡，最好中掩蓋這最糟糕的。並且往往是最壞的壓倒最好的。比如說林黛玉五世的侯門小姐姐，探花父親書香門第之女，家資饒福也可以說是巨富，相貌賽過西施，才學遠高於八鬥，聰明超過比干還多一竅，機智過人，反應敏捷， 往往是先找到爆笑點並加以融會貫通在極快的時間裡激活大家的快樂神經，但她又是一個愛哭的形象，這就是一個平衡點，黛玉所有的全優品行和個人的魅力下面卻隱藏這一個致命的弱點就是多愁多病的身，這又是一個平衡點，而且可以說是黛玉的死穴，黛玉的所有頂級品質和才華包括巨額財富都在這個致命弱點下化為烏有， 那麼寶釵的平衡點在哪裡？寶釵幾乎是可以和機關算盡太聰明的王熙鳳的智商和算計能力相媲美的，她算到了寶玉婚姻大事的決策者不是賈母，不是寶玉，也不是黛玉而是賈政和王夫人，她算到了拿下王夫人是至關重要的一分並且拿下了。 她算到了拿下賈母也就拿下了王熙鳳也拿下了，拿下賈母也應該有黛玉身體不好幫的忙讓賈母有放棄黛玉的心。她一路高奏凱歌如願以償的讓寶玉穿著婚禮盛裝坐到了自己的旁邊並順利的洞房花燭。但卻沒有算到自己將來會是孤獨一生的命運，這就是寶釵的平衡點，也是悲劇打敗喜劇。 紅樓夢文學價值還在於文學史中大量女性悲劇的合集，令人痛徹心扉，也可以說是一部悲情小說，但卻給人有深重的教誨 就像魯迅先生說的在我的眼下的寶玉，卻看見他看見許多死亡。我不知道曹雪芹眼裡是不是真的見識了許多的死亡尤其是女子，他幾乎寫盡各種死亡，病死的秦可卿和黛玉，元春，王熙鳳。秦可卿還有上吊的嫌疑，上吊的鮑二家的，跳井的金釧，自殺的尤二姐和自刎的尤三姐，還有自殺的鴛鴦， 原本已經逃過夏金桂的毒手，應該是大難不死必有後福的香菱也死於難產，在曹雪芹眼裡沒有大難不死必有後福一說，自己喝自己下的毒藥毒死的夏金桂，自己撞牆而死的司琪。做風流鬼的賈瑞和秦鐘，打死的馮公子，不一而足。為什麼曹雪芹要寫這麼多的死亡，大概他是想告訴人們世事無常，生死有命。 紅樓夢也給了我們遠高於文學價值的東西 但我感覺整個小說的死亡比例嚴重偏高，而每次死都是死得驚天動地，而最後最好的結局都顯得的很平平，紅樓夢給人的感覺並沒有充滿喜慶的紅色，而是血色。也因為大量悲劇的刻畫使紅樓夢成為了女性死亡大集合的範本，把死寫得刻骨銘心，痛徹心扉，才能給活著的人留下深刻的記憶， 記住每一位女子的慘死就記住了一部人生的極其深刻的教誨，而且是很多部不同類型和篇章，黛玉的死告訴我們人生最重要的是健康，秦可卿的死告訴我們要想人不知除非己莫為，香菱的死的含義是大難過後不一定有後福，尤二姐的死說明美麗不和智商成比例而且成反比的話死得很慘。 尤三姐的死告誡我們為虛擬的愛抹脖子是愚蠢的，元春，迎春的死是有一個愚蠢的父親是可怕的。鮑二家的死是偷情無罪要注重的是談吐而不是吐痰。得罪王熙鳳後果很嚴重。金釧的死是測試地球引力不是開玩笑的不能用身體去測試，用石頭測試就可以了。賈寶玉不是你生命的唯一當成之一不可以嗎？ 晴雯的死是原則上該試試的時候就試試，也許試試更健康，做成做不成姨娘那是以後的事，再就是管好嘴，沉默是金因為你太漂亮了。一切學襲人沒錯。王熙鳳的死當然就是機關不能太算盡也不要太聰明，睜一隻眼閉一隻眼有利健康和人氣。 鴛鴦的死肯定是你的死和死一隻螞蟻有什麼區別，因為你把自己的生命等同於一隻螞蟻。老太太不需要你這種愚蠢的忠心。賈瑞的死我們只能說世界上真還有比癩蛤蟆還不如百倍的生物。秦鐘的死證明情慾可以悅人也可以殺人。 馮公子的死很顯然遇到呆霸王薛蟠只有一條路就是三十六計跑為先，跑得快當元帥，跑得慢地獄見。紅樓夢我們能學到的還遠遠不止這些，也許是可以學一輩子的，這些都遠高於紅樓夢的文學價值。謝謝大家。 紅樓夢 作者 李叔叔抄報| 2020-08-28 09:39:04閱讀204 0 本文僅代表作者個人觀點，不代表百度百科立場。檢舉 轉載本文時請於文首標明作者姓名，保持文章完整性，並請附上出處（百科TA說）及本頁連結地址。未依照規範轉載者，百度百科保留追究相應責任的權利。 漫剪小哥 和大家一起來賞析紅樓夢 紅樓夢 《紅樓夢》，中國古代章回體長篇小說，中國古典四大名著之一。其通行本共120回，一般認為前80回是清代作家曹雪芹所著，後40回作者為無名氏，整理者為程偉元、高鷂。小說以賈、史、王、薛四大家族的興衰為背景，以富貴公子賈寶玉為視角，以賈寶玉與林黛玉、薛寶釵的愛... 綢精裝四大名著全套原著正版無刪減青少年版中學生書 九龍坡區闌珊圖書工.. 廣告 紅樓夢續文20：林黛玉死後穿的2件衣服，展現寶釵之醜黛玉之美 小涵故事匯 綢精裝四大名著全套原著正版無刪減青少年版中學生書 紅樓夢賈家興衰史寶黛愛情悲劇展現封建社會面貌紅樓夢唐僧師徒取經奇幻冒險神話色彩紅樓夢東漢末年西晉初年三國鼎立局面紅樓夢宋朝末年一群好漢聚義樑山抗貪官污吏故事 九龍坡區闌珊圖書工..廣告 立秋是秋天的開始嗎？看看《紅樓夢》中是如何界定的 少讀紅樓 賈家抄家，是北靜王在背後操縱，賈寶玉拿了他三樣東西惹來大禍 君紓雅侃紅樓

被國際禁止討論！15年前，美軍研發出了比核彈更恐怖的東西，第三次世界大戰差點因此爆發，不開火就能摧毀一個國家 [She's Xiaowu 小烏]

Reticular Chemistry and Materials for Water Harvesting from Air Anytime ...

Reticular Chemistry and Materials for Water Harvesting from Air Anytime Anywhere- Omar Yaghi ASU School of Molecular Sciences 1.47K subscribers Subscribe 50 Share Download Save 1,771 views Nov 23, 2021 Professor Omar Yaghi from University of California, Berkeley, delivered the spectacular Inaugural O'Keeffe Lecture "Reticular Chemistry and Materials for Water Harvesting from Air Anytime Anywhere" at ASU' School of Molecular Sciences on November 19, 2021. Established in 2019 by the School of Molecular Sciences, the O’Keeffe Lecture Series honors the scientific contributions of Regents Professor Michael O’Keeffe. It celebrates his seminal contributions to the study of crystalline inorganic solids, his role in the invention of reticular chemistry, and his important contributions to the reputation of Arizona State University as a place for innovative and impactful research. Learn more about Dr. O’Keeffe’s Career Accomplishments: • Regents Professor O'Keeffe's Career A... Key moments View all Transcript Transcript Search in video 0:03 okay good afternoon everybody i'm really happy to see everybody here 0:08 um this is an event we've been trying to put on for over a year and so i'd like to thank everybody for 0:14 your patience i think we all understand what the issues were we finally felt it was safe enough to have this gathering 0:20 and the purpose of this is introduce uh a new event for the school 0:26 this is an event i believe is an important one both for the scientific culture of the school 0:32 and also to recognize the contributions of one of its most important members 0:41 actually i'd like to take a couple of minutes to step back and talk about those contributions and put them in a 0:46 context which i believe shouldn't be forgotten i think we've all heard this expressions 0:52 like standing on the shoulders of giants i actually believe the school of molecular sciences stands on the 0:57 shoulders of the original department of chemistry and biochemistry here asu 1:02 and that builds on a lot of truly outstanding creative work 1:08 that came out of the original department in the scientific rankings actually 1:14 matter asu in chemistry and biochemistry always comes out close to the top 1:20 in 2011 thomson reuters did a study of scientific impact of publications 1:27 and asu was ranked number six worldwide i'd have a head of mit 1:32 head of stanford ahead of michigan and ucla 1:38 he's not watching but not berkeley 1:43 you know that work was done by an incredible group of really powerful and creative scientists 1:50 and there are a lot of them uh for instance and this this group includes peter busick carlton moore 1:56 bob pettit austin angel of course tom and anna and devons and many others 2:03 and so the school is really indebted to this group of people and the person 2:09 who's probably at the top of that list would be mike mike o'keefe was the third most 2:15 scientist chemist in the world in the first decade of the new millennium mike has been doing groundbreaking work 2:22 on the atomic and electronic structure of crystal materials asu for decades 2:28 he's made really important contributions not just in moths i'm not going to summarize mike's career 2:35 today right in fact i'd encourage you to take a look at a beautiful video that's put together by peter and if you don't 2:41 know the link to the video send me an email send it to you but my contributions were they say went well 2:47 beyond just morphs mike wrote a paper on valence bond parameters and crystal chemistry has 2:52 been cited over 6 000 times it was the first to characterize the electronic structure of a meteorite by 2:59 electron microscopy on its own he and john spence of course developed well observed maybe the first 3:05 observations of atomic orbitals and then of course in a conversation with omar when they were discussing some 3:12 structure mike said can you synthesize this thing i almost said of course we can synthesize this thing not knowing if 3:18 we could and of course he did as the first morph and the rest is history 3:25 mike is one of the most one of the best but most humble scientists i think i've met 3:32 he has been recognized i've actually i would say mike is under-recognized actually but he has has received 3:37 recognition he was a bernal distinguished lecturer he had received a world-class 3:42 professorship at kist in korea he won the new newcom cleveland plaza prize in 3:47 triple a s so did omar in 2019 he was awarded the yamanov prize 3:54 along with omar mike has over 100 thousand citations 4:00 and an h index of over a hundred 4:06 the school since the department of course has grown in diversity and grown very rapidly 4:13 to the point where we found that it's putting a strain on the standard weekly seminars right you know how do we find 4:19 uh speakers who uh who are actually broad enough to appeal to the entire entire sms 4:25 community so we decided to split the seminar series into two so we have specialized seminars and there are 4:31 seminars which are reserved for speakers whose work is so broad and impactful that the entire school will be 4:37 interested in it so hence we have the o'keefe lecture series 4:44 mike's work has been so beautiful so broad and impactful that i can't think of a better name to 4:51 go to describe the spirit of this new lecture series and so here we are finally at the 4:57 first one and of course there could be no more fitting person to give the first hokkien 5:03 lectures than than omar professor omar yagi of the university of 5:09 california berkeley you know we often say that people need no introduction and almost only doesn't 5:15 but just in case you don't know omar began his academic career here at asu in 1992 5:22 1999 he moves to university of michigan the robert parry professor of chemistry 5:28 in 2006 the ucla is the chris foote professor of chemistry and since 2012 he's been the james and 5:36 nielty care chair and professor of chemistry uc berkeley 5:42 he's a senior faculty scientist at ron's berkeley lab he's the founding director of the 5:47 berkeley global science institute i have to read all this stuff there so much the co-director of the cavali energy 5:53 nanosciences institute and the california research alliance 5:59 almost obviously most well-known for the invention the design the synthesis 6:04 of moths coughs and many other structures which fall into the larger umbrella now reticular 6:10 chemistry it's not the only thing he's done he's also responsible for the invention of the field molecular weaving and many 6:16 others i have a list right of wars that omar's 6:22 one and it's very long i'm not going to go through them all just pick one or two 1998 he won the solid state chemistry 6:28 award the american chemical society when he was still at asu 19 2009 the material chemistry award for 6:34 the american chemical society the triple a s newcom cleveland plaza prize award winner 6:40 when the royal society of chemistry centenary prize the japanese society of coordination 6:45 chemistry international award the albert einstein world award of sciences he's received the wolf prize the yamanov 6:52 prize and just this year the royal society of chemist sustainable water award which connects to the title at the top 7:01 we really appreciate omar taking the time to come visit us he told me this is the first time he's given a public lecture since the pandemic 7:08 so we appreciate that and we like to recognize the occasion actually by giving omar a little small 7:14 plaque so omar please got a small plaque to recognize this and the plaque has 7:20 the infamous moth five right there there we go so omayagi university california 7:25 berkeley reticular chemistry materials for water harvesting from air anytime anywhere november 2021 the o'keefe 7:33 lecture series so omar thank you for coming please we won't shake hands but you can take this smile for the camera 7:39 [Applause] 7:45 thank you so with that omar please the floor is yours thank you 7:52 thank you ian for that nice introduction and also um introducing the o'keeffe lectureship 7:59 it's real pleasure to be here on many many levels not the least of which 8:05 is uh really to speak on behalf of michael o'keefe and my collaborations 8:12 with him in inventing a new branch of chemistry highly understated but nevertheless i 8:20 will express it in my own in my own words i think it's uh it's also 8:27 really nice of sms to recognize one of its members in this in this way 8:33 and uh i hope that um that this tradition would will 8:38 continue so no surprise the title of my talk is reticular chemistry and more 8:44 specifically the invention of reticular chemistry and the development of reticular chemistry 8:49 but also the outlet of this chemistry one of the outlets among many is the water 8:55 harvesting from desert air and when you can harvest water from desert air you can do 9:02 it anywhere at any time of the year so 9:09 my very first paper at asu is this one it doesn't have 9:15 michael o'keefe on it he wouldn't talk to me actually until i had published something 9:20 so in 94 my idea was let's link building units together with metal ions to make 9:27 extended structures and in fact we made the first porous metal sulfides this is you're looking at 9:34 it that was done at asu and i was very happy with this with this 9:40 development but i went to visit michael o'keefe in his office 9:47 to brag about my new result okay and [Music] 9:52 and i just want to talk about the inspirational power of molecular models if you knew mike o'keefe and you visited 9:58 his office you will see that it's completely decorated with different models because i think you can't actually study a 10:05 structure without building a model of it and so mike said 10:11 i i was wondering what that model looks like so this model ended up in my lab but really 10:18 started in michael o'keefe's lab and it's a structure that is known in 10:24 minerals but mike had figured out that instead of let's say a silicon 10:30 you could have a cluster of atoms and these cluster of atoms could be anywhere from the periodic table as long as they 10:36 maintain that geometry potentially this could be made and so he 10:42 actually said this when i saw this model i said what is this model he explained it to me it was my very first time to 10:48 see an extended structure quite honestly and and he explained it to me and 10:55 and then he followed that by saying i bet you can't make that and that's not a testament necessarily 11:01 that that i was not a very good professor or scientist but i think more that this was 11:06 really a more of a blue sky research and it's not a very possible 11:12 objective for a synthetic chemist and i said no i bet you that i can make 11:17 it and i took the model with me and gave it to haley and lee as you see 11:23 him here my my student well it turns out that we made 11:29 actually the even larger member of what michael o'keefe had 11:36 imagined and that's shown here this is a crystal structure of sodalite where the vertices instead 11:43 of having one tetrahedron they have 10 tetrahedra you see them here in 11:49 10 tetrahedra that have an overall tetrahedral geometry and you can put them on a 11:54 vertices of this mineral and actually make a porous in this case metal sulfide 12:01 well this was a whole new field of research right here okay we published in science in 99 and 12:08 you can see here mike o'keefe was a major contributor to this 12:13 in fact this is michael o'keefe's drawings on one of his uh now very old-fashioned 12:20 program but nevertheless very beautiful program and he put the yellow ball in there which has become famous 12:26 since then it started out as a pink ball purple ball red ball 12:31 where there was a lot of debate green ball and then in the end i made the decisive decision that the 12:37 yellow ball should be uh yellow because the the ball should be yellow because that was arizona state 12:43 university's logo on the on the logo i think it's still on the logo but in the meantime the 12:50 the this is the power of having models and discussing with colleagues who are interested in 12:56 discussion and in the meantime my students were 13:02 busy doing stuff and you know i'm a young assistant professor when i joined asu i was only 26 years old and betty 13:09 here in the front knows everybody's age and she can tell you for sure but i was 13:14 i was 26 years old and my students were making these kinds of compounds where instead of a metal 13:20 cluster an inorganic metal cluster they were linking organic units 13:26 such as these by pyridine neutral organic ligands this is the fact that it's neutral becomes 13:31 important later linking them with copper one and i looked at this and i said 13:38 oh gosh this is this is like the other hundreds of compounds that are out there in the 13:44 literature why are you doing this research and this student kept pushing this 13:50 actually in front of me this and other compounds she kept pushing those in front of me showing me 13:56 x-ray powder diffractions of them showing me single crystal structure and i kept saying i don't want to talk to you 14:03 i am i want to get tenure for god's sake i want to focus on the metal sulfides we've already 14:08 we've already been very successful with the metal sulfides not these metal organics the reason i was discouraged by 14:15 the student's result or approach was that these metal organics made from very 14:20 similar neutral linkers with copper one were reported back in 1959 14:27 and people have been making them since 1959. so 14:33 i wasn't and they were just in my opinion they were sculptures they were not useful for anything once you got the 14:39 crystal structure you drew it you admired it and that was it they didn't inspire new applications or use 14:46 as you will see because they collapse once you start using the pores you they 14:52 collapse and this is another example just to show in 1986 same thing neutral linkers 14:59 linked by copper and in 1989 robson reported same 15:05 kind of linkers neutral linkers with copper one made in exactly the same way 15:10 to make diamond nets in the same way 15:16 no different same reaction same metal same kind of linker 15:21 and same underlying topology but i want to pause here and say that many in the community 15:28 like to think that robson started the field of of reticular chemistry or mops 15:33 and as you will see you can judge for yourself okay by the end of my talk because what we 15:40 what i did having colleagues like peter williams and michael o'keefe and 15:48 all these ambitious guys peter busek and so on i have to get tenure and i have to do 15:55 something that makes a difference and so to me these were useless because i couldn't 16:00 make them truly porous they collapsed upon trying to 16:05 use the pores and and and so in the community this community was called crystal engineering in fact in the us 16:12 you couldn't get a grant funded in this topic because it was really 16:18 criticized by the establishment that this is not a viable field so 16:25 so what we did my training was in inorganic chemistry and so i knew that if you use 16:31 anionic links such as these carboxylates and link them to metal ions 16:37 if you could crystallize what we then called moths then you would then you would have 16:43 strong bonds you would have strong architectures and therefore you could potentially 16:49 exploit the porosity again i would like to point out that 16:54 those same group here robson's group 16:59 in some of their papers i discovered years later had written that in fact carboxylate 17:06 frameworks such as the ones we discovered in 95 would be impossible to crystallize 17:12 unfortunately they didn't have the nice students that i had in 95 at asu 17:18 and so we were off to the races we reported that in nature 17:24 and everybody was excited we were off in the direction of inorganic frameworks and 17:30 these moths so these structures that i showed you from previous to moths they collapsed 17:38 they were not designable this becomes very important particular chemistry is that they are made from vertices that 17:44 are single metal virtues not aggregates the carboxylates aggregated the metals so now you have clusters that can direct 17:50 the structure for you and make a stable structure they're not chemically stable and there are definitely not polymers 17:57 they're actually misnomer so those coordination polymers containing neutral linkers are not 18:03 viable for the things that i'm going to talk to you about so so immediately then in 98 we had to show 18:10 that in fact you can make a moth not just crystalline but that the pores can remain open in 18:17 the absence of guests and we use the strategy of carboxylates with metals to make these aggregates and 18:23 link them up into extended structures such as what you see here 18:30 and i had a student a postdoc come to me his name is muhammad adi while i was at 18:36 asu this structure was made by halyan lee and then muhammad adi as a postdoc came 18:42 to me and i said to him your job is to take this structure and see whether it's architecture robust by measuring the gas 18:49 adsorption isotherm which is done at 77 kelvin and it is the really the gold standard for proving 18:57 that your material can remain open in the absence of guests and therefore you could use 19:02 the pores this was this is the aspect that was missing in the field i actually have the referee reports on 19:09 this paper that basically said that 19:15 so this sbu approach was so amazing and later mike o'keefe and i started thinking about the carboxylate carbon 19:21 atoms as squares as forming a square so that now you have a square grid 19:27 so and the way we made them was quite simple you take the organic acid you link it up 19:33 with zinc plus and this is this is the key development here is that you have a way to 19:39 crystallize it under these conditions i won't go through all the details of balancing the kinetics and 19:44 thermodynamics of crystallization here that led us to single crystals but muhammad adi's job as soon as he 19:51 appeared in my office i said to him that your job is to measure the gas option isotherm 19:59 and he went to the lab and said which was in the basement of goldwater building here 20:04 he said you don't have a machine that measures gas absorption isotherms and i said well build one 20:11 okay so he went to the lab of wagner i think you remember dave 20:18 wagner had nanobalances that he used to use for catalysis to dose oxygen into his catalyst and 20:25 measure how much oxygen using a nanobalance so he interfaced the nanobalance with the um 20:32 schlenk line type device and really measure the isotherm 20:38 this is the very first isotherm that showed to the entire community that metal organics could be made 20:45 to be porous and uh and that's it this basically gave the 20:52 this field that was full of arc full of what i would say sculptures gave it um 20:58 [Music] a basis to go on and make frameworks that are now useful because now you can 21:05 remove the gas and put new ones in the new ones could be hydrogen methane whatever or you could functionalize the 21:12 pores and do very specific transformations so this meant everything but 21:18 there will always be people who say i've done it first but then when you look in detail they haven't done it 21:24 they just have done some experiment looks like the right experiment but it's not and and this is 21:31 one of them somebody took this compound and pressurized it with gas 21:38 at room temperature that's not a gas absorption isothermal you can pressurize any object even my tie and it will take 21:45 up gas okay so that doesn't prove porosity permanent porosity that doesn't mean 21:51 that i can evacuate on the molecular level the material and put new ones in so but this remains until today 21:59 people say not people but these authors saying that they prove porosity that doesn't prove porosity 22:04 especially since from this data you cannot get the porosity data which is surface area and poor volume 22:11 you can't use this data to do that you need the gas adsorption isotherm and 22:17 this is the measurement that everyone now uses this here 22:22 in the moff field every moth that is being used today is based on 22:28 metal carboxylates and it's characterized by 22:33 gas absorption isotherm in the way i see it here okay so 22:40 mike o'keefe used to sometimes pass by my office in the basement of 22:45 goldwater on his way to his office which was in the physical sciences building and this particular morning i had 22:52 forwarded him a crystal structure of a new compound we discovered 22:58 okay and that compound in response and i said what did you think of the structure and 23:03 he said this is so beautiful it will be the best thing you've ever done 23:10 and little did he realize that we will do much more than that together and that's really the magic of 23:16 that collaboration that compound was what we called map okay 23:22 so mark 5 was discovered in my lab at halian's initiative of linking metal 23:30 oxide units with organic linkers or doing the reactions that would produce these metal oxide units and this was 23:36 really the beginning of the the true beginning in the eyes of the public of 23:42 of um or the community of of the maf field because the surface area when we measured the gas absorption isotherm was 23:50 so high that people when we published this paper people thought it was a misprint 23:57 surface area is 2 900 meters square per gram in the basement of goldwater when the 24:03 students they had not slept for a whole night muhammad and halian measuring this 24:10 point by point because you have to wait until each each dosing of the gas has equilibrated and 24:17 the and you have a constant uptake measurement and so it took them all night 24:23 and i said is it reproducible and of course they thought oh gosh not another night 24:29 okay they keep reminding me of that until today so we made sure it's reproducible 24:35 and on top of that i wasn't going to say to the world i just broke the 1000 year 24:40 record held for porosity by carbon without sending it let's say to an independent 24:48 company at the time in georgia to confirm that the surface area was 24:53 what we think it is actually the numbers always hovered above 2 900 25:00 because we didn't in those days we didn't quite understand the chemistry of the poor we can evacuate the poor but we 25:07 could never figure out is it completely evacuated or not it turns out that maf5 now we can 25:14 activate it so well that it has a surface area of almost 4 200 meter square per gram 25:20 but we went and reported the lowest number that we obtained just 25:25 because as an assistant professor i was worried that i might make a mistake 25:31 so anyway it turns out to be higher than that and now we have the concept of sbus 25:38 articulated by mike o'keefe and myself in that now you take the carboxylate 25:43 carbons to have a primitive cubic structure and once you know the conditions under which to make this 25:50 you could functionalize the linkers and make the same structure what we called in those days iso reticular 25:57 structure meaning having the same underlying net well 26:03 it didn't take mike very long to recognize that basically any building 26:08 unit that you could get your hands on which could be a geometric unit can be 26:14 linked together into into a network that he had described in his book 26:20 the yellow book that was already published when i joined asu 26:26 so we could take linkers that are benign such as acetic acid or 26:33 terethalate lactic acid and make moths out of them so you can make muffs that are edible 26:41 let's see they've been eaten by some of started students and 26:47 and you can make moths from the most exotic linkers so 26:53 so what what this meant is that any linker any cluster that you can imagine 26:59 you can get your hands on you can make it into a move remember these mobs are structures that 27:05 people said they could not be crystallized and so you can imagine the excitement in the field 27:12 so like i said with mike's thinking about using the building units of geometric objects 27:18 we were able to then these are mike's drawings actually 27:24 we were able to take squares when with the proper organic linker that can put these 27:30 squares at a required angles we could make zero-dimensional structures chains ladders square grids 27:37 and three-dimensional structures so so all of a sudden a linker like 27:43 terethalate became conveyor of geometric information so 27:48 that you can make them off that you desire the the the um 27:53 terethali depending on the angles between the carboxylates whether it's the bending angle the twisting angle or 27:59 the folding angle they were all now important information that can channel 28:04 you into the desired structure and needless to say we were able to make all 28:11 of those we made the this is the bend structure puts the squares at 120 28:16 degrees together and make the first nano 28:21 particle that has been characterized by single crystal x-ray diffraction okay so this is a truncated cube 28:27 octahedron and i won't go through these but you can see that 28:32 we went through the [Music] um [Music] through the exercise of making sure we 28:38 find or we designed the right uh linkers that provide you with the angles 28:45 required to make those moths and in those topologies this is a this is a scenario a very nice 28:51 scenario where here in this example you have 28:58 the squares could be so the squares here are in the same 29:03 plane so you make the square grid and if you have one bromo one halogen 29:08 here that puts the carboxylase at 90 degrees and if you don't heat this moth structure 29:15 you'll be able to keep the carboxylase at 90 degrees they won't overcome the barrier to rotation and now you have a 29:21 three-dimensional framework okay so we showed the feasibility of making 29:27 moths in crystalline form we showed that you can take the interior of the maf out and use 29:33 the space inside okay this uh then was a an emerging new field 29:41 because anything a chemist can imagine now we've shown that you can make 29:46 so it was time to sit down and put a really a thinking basis for 29:53 the field in terms of which geometric unit could give you which structures and of course you can imagine there is infinite number 30:00 of structures that could be made in this way depending on the geometry so so mike came up with this idea that all 30:07 structures can be viewed as collection of linkers and intersections that allowed us to basically take any 30:14 structure no matter how complex it is and reduce it into two components one is the node that's your branching 30:21 intersection and the other one is link and depending on how these things came together you 30:26 made a net and that net mike o'keefe 30:32 who was called by many the net guru was able to identify it or predict it 30:37 and so so that's this is done in his book 30:42 first this idea of making nets from nodes and links was introduced by 30:48 af wells and and really perfected and applied by michael o'keefe in his uh in his book 30:56 so and we built a website that basically tells you which structure you're going to make by combining which 31:03 geometries together that's the reticular chemistry structure resource 31:09 so how do you choose from among the millions and millions of possible structure almost infinite number of 31:15 possible structures and mike 31:20 said for the assembly of symmetric molecular shapes only a small number of simple high symmetry structures will be 31:26 of overriding importance and they will be expected to form most commonly okay so you're as long as 31:33 you're starting with symmetric units you're probably going to fall very likely fall in the more symmetric nets so that made life 31:39 much easier for for mike to basically say hey if 31:45 if i want to know what the synthesis is going to produce i have to go after the most symmetric structures 31:51 and those turn out to be not many it could be you know 50 or so for different geometries and 31:59 most of the time he was correct sometimes he was not correct we made 32:04 things that were not as symmetric as he thought but most of the time it was correct it it it became an intellectual 32:11 framework to putting building units together thanks to mike's work 32:17 and we came up with what i call the periodic table of reticular chemistry so if you're a student and you can think up 32:25 building units all you have to do is come to this table and say okay i've got triangles and this is what they're going 32:30 to give me different geometries and these were 32:35 enumerated by mike for many different geometries 32:41 progressively higher connectivity and higher complexity and you can see here 32:47 for those in the audience who are interested in this field there's still plenty of room for you to contribute 32:53 by making some of these which have not been made yet okay 32:59 so the field started in 95 by the crystallization of the first moth 33:04 they were named moth at asu in that paper and 33:10 in 99 because of the ultra high porosity that broke all records of porosity that 33:15 paper with mike on that paper became mafs became a sensation and now 33:23 in 2020 the research is being done on moths in over 100 33:29 countries around the world so they've given a lot of inspiration to emerging scholars to young people who 33:35 want to enter chemistry but also they are very seriously being researched 33:41 by groups either on making moths studying moths 33:47 or applying moths in various um uh applications 33:53 okay so that was metal organic and i was always i was always i was always excited by new 33:59 frontiers how do i build the next new frontier moths 34:05 we were doing mops and we are still doing more of chemistry but i wanted my excitement came 34:10 from building the new frontier and that we have always i've always been interested in linking organic compounds 34:17 together to make extended structures and roald hoffmann back in 93 although i didn't discover 34:23 this statement until much later i wish i did i would have put it in my proposals 34:30 but he said that there is nothing nothing in two and three dimension there's no 34:35 infinite extended organic structures that are covalently linked in two and three dimension so it was wide open 34:42 nobody has managed to crystallize anything for uh organic compounds in two and three 34:49 dimension because every time you did that you got a powder diffraction that looks like this 34:54 and a chemist can't do very much with that okay it's it's very poorly crystalline 35:00 or amorphous so what we did in my group we were able to turn this into a true 35:06 crystalline material and that's from this reaction taking this diboronic 35:14 acid and dehydrating it you would think this is a simple reaction which it is 35:20 but it doesn't make crystalline material so it took the students many years to get this to work and these 35:27 are the magic conditions where water is produced in this reaction and because you're running this in a sealed tube you 35:34 can control the pressure of water to control the reversibility of the reaction therefore 35:39 the crystallization of the cough i can i can talk for an entire lecture 35:45 about the discovery of coughs because it is a true expression of the importance of 35:51 the interaction between the professor and the student in a pleasant way so 35:57 that's that's that hump that i showed you turns into very sharp x-ray potter diffraction 36:06 that was cough one the very first cough we published in 2005 and this is the structure that we obtained from 36:12 x-ray powder diffraction three-dimensional structures could be made by make by starting out with 36:18 three-dimensional uh four connected tetrahedra let's say 36:24 building units and dehydrating that to make triangles as links 36:30 and the the organic links that you put in the nice thing about coughs is that 36:35 unlike moths what you put in does not change they're only linked together through one bond 36:42 or one form they don't really decompose and come together again so 36:48 they're very predictable and because mike had worked out which nets we're going to produce from 36:54 which building units it was easy for us to link them together and then look at the powder diffraction and match it to 37:01 the simulated positive fraction that we got from the predicted structures 37:08 that's why you see mike's name on some of these cough papers these are the nets that mike had 37:16 predicted for joining triangles with tetrahedra these 37:21 are the two most symmetric possibilities and both of them we made by matching the simulated x-ray positive 37:28 fraction to the experimental positive fraction that gave that gave us the initial model to to 37:34 to refine the structure this turns out to be one of the least dense materials known today it's 37:41 entirely composed of boron oxygen and carbon linked by covalent bonds 37:48 well that field now just recently we were able to make 37:54 something that mike said that that he would retire if i could link molecules by 38:00 carbon-carbon bonds okay he said something more severe than that 38:06 but but anyway so so we did 38:11 and the conditions that we use for the initial coughs were modified but now adding trifluoroacetic has a 38:18 very strong acid to reverse the reaction but still lock it down into this incredibly stable structure this is a 38:25 carbon-carbon bonded linker and of course carbon nitrogen these are all very strong bonds 38:32 this is an amazing structure no one would have predicted that you can do this under 150 degrees under such mild 38:40 conditions or or at all actually because if you go to a very high temperature you're going to decompose your call 38:47 so this is the x-ray positive fraction and you can see that 38:52 we use spectroscopy nmr and ir to make sure that the right linkages are being made but look at the stability you can 39:00 take this cough and put it in concentrated hcl saturated koh 39:06 in in water in methanol do whatever you want put it in corrosive and butyl lithium and the structure is unaffected 39:13 and that's what we expected with carbon-carbon bonded frameworks okay 39:20 that was that's the holy grail of coughs so now the rest 39:25 is just a lot of trials and errors to find the right conditions for other carbon-carbon 39:31 bonded structures but the path is already open and i don't want to 39:37 just say that we solve those crystal structures by powder but we also more recently 39:43 have been successful in making single crystal structures or single crystals of these coughs large 39:50 single crystals okay and you can see here the size is the same 39:56 size that an organic chemist would have for their molecules but this is an extended infinite structure avogadro's 40:03 worth of unit cells that are linked together entirely by covalent 40:09 by covalent bonds so and thus the birth of what we call 40:15 reticular chemistry so in 2003 mike and i wrote a 40:20 i would say a foundational paper that defined the parameters of the field and the definition of reticular 40:27 chemistry has three components i don't know how you can actually 40:32 see the future and write something of this kind that is still valid until 40:38 today it's just building blocks strong bonds to make durable materials 40:43 building blocks to design structures strong bonds to make durable materials that are going to harvest water from air 40:50 year after year after year and crystalline so that you can define 40:55 your structure on the atomic and molecular level and know the and understand the chemistry of that 41:01 framework so this is still valid until today and i don't think anybody can modify it any 41:07 better to make it fit what is happening today in the field so that resulted in moths 41:13 and coughs and more recently molecular weaving this is another extremely exciting field 41:19 we discovered we were the first to discover molecular weaving and when i sent our paper to 41:26 michael o'keefe he was busy predicting the next generation of 41:33 molecular woven structures and i think he calls it now decousade chemistry the chemistry of crossings i 41:40 this is really i'm not doing justice to the molecular weaving because it has it does propel 41:46 moth chemistry into the making materials that have incredible mechanical 41:53 strength and and but this is a topic for another 41:58 another so i'd like to to put now in context of the 42:05 larger chemistry and society what we have done 42:10 together we have made new materials and new materials in general have tracked 42:16 very closely with advances in human civilization in fact we humans refer to those as different 42:22 ages like stone age to define the materials that we were using at the time bronze age and iron age and glass age 42:31 steel age and aluminum age and the plastic age and the 42:38 the more we are able to design these and manipulate them on a finer and finer level 42:44 the better our lives got okay so we have the molecular age i would say in 42:50 the last century that led us to pharmaceuticals mainly 42:56 pharmaceuticals and then i would say we are and this is not ostentatious this is can be 43:02 supported by evidence the reticular age okay 43:08 reticular age because it controls matter beyond the molecule into infinite 2d and 43:14 3d that's that's the materials world but it's it's well defined on the atomic and 43:19 molecular level and you can use molecular chemistry on the extended systems so who could argue that 43:27 this is not the reticular age okay so 43:33 so we were awarded the amino prize which is a very nice prize 43:38 that is it's it states that those people who get it have done something beautiful 43:44 [Music] and useful and i think i think that 43:49 mike o'keefe's statement when we discovered ma five it is so beautiful and that is really true 43:57 and there's nothing like it so for this is for the development of particular chemistry i'm i'm especially honored 44:04 to have received this prize with michael o'keefe okay so now 44:10 very quickly in the time remaining i want to just give you an idea of what some of the things that we have been doing 44:17 with mafs in terms of applications i think that there are three stresses facing our planet 44:23 one of them is the stress of trying to use clean fuels like hydrogen which burns with only 44:30 water as a by-product that's a dream that that potentially we can address or 44:36 that's a challenge that we can address carbon dioxide 44:42 a child born today breathes almost double the amount of carbon dioxide than one that was born 44:48 before the industrial revolution and that tells you the extent of the problem and it's getting worse and it's affecting our climate 44:55 and water right we'll talk more about water in fact i want to zip through hydrogen carbon 45:00 dioxide with a couple of slides and then focus on water but fortunately 45:06 we have the periodic table and with reticular chemistry we have a way to stitch these elements together to 45:13 make new materials that i believe are beginning to address this these 45:18 challenges materials are going to become more and more complex i think 45:23 and that's why reticular chemistry is so attractive to students to young scholars 45:29 because it's all about control it's all about the control on the atomic and molecular level once you're able to 45:35 control matter on that tiny level you can solve any problem 45:42 as long as society has the will to put the resources behind it but i don't think 45:48 we have failed in solving problems once we have that control 45:53 and the resources to express it and here's an example of 45:58 i just like to give this example our cell phone has more elements in it than 46:04 than our human than the body human body okay and that just tells you we need to 46:10 be able to control things more and more so that we can make uh objects that are able to carry out 46:17 complexity and that are durable and robust that's reticular chemistry that's a 46:24 strong bond okay so one of the things that we have done is hydrogen storage this is a moth 46:30 in red and the white spots are the hydrogen molecules 46:37 and the idea is that instead of hydrogen filling a very large volume 46:43 we create a maf that could attract the hydrogen through electrostatic forces or polarization forces and therefore you 46:49 can pack it on its internal surface and therefore stack the hydrogen molecules 46:55 like you would let's say stack cars in a in a car park and here 47:01 you see how the hydrogen molecules are hovering in this 47:08 computation hovering around the maf structure and therefore you're able to store more hydrogen 47:15 per unit volume with the moth than without them off even though the maf occupies its own volume 47:21 you still can store more within them off than without them off except that 47:27 you have open space here that's not doing you any good right that's that's open space so 47:33 your your fuel tank is going to be so much larger 47:38 because you have this open space but reticular chemistry can fix this because we know how to design 47:44 materials that could self-caterinate again enumerated by 47:50 michael o'keefe and that's that's this structure you could fill that space by having two 47:56 independent frameworks come together and mechanically fill each other 48:02 that way now i have introduced more absorptive sites i doubled my adsorptive sites per unit volume 48:10 and so this is the results of that experiment where this is now at room temperature we're taking up hydrogen 48:18 over 1.5 by weight not a lot but significant 48:24 and it's reversible because not tied to the framework by covalent bonds so let me just uh make a long story 48:31 short here because this is an ongoing research we are right now with hydrogen 48:37 in terms of binding energy the strength of interaction between hydrogen and the framework we are at about 12 to 13 48:44 kilojoules per mole and that gets you around two percent by weight 48:50 okay not in this structure but another structure that has an exposed metal side so two to two point five if you really 48:57 use the right metal but 2.5 is the absolute maximum of where we are right now 49:02 at this binding energy this is for mop five so we have been able through tinkering 49:09 with the moth to get it to be stronger and store around two to two point five 49:14 weight percent of hydrogen we need to get to 20 kilojoules per mole to be able 49:19 to store enough to make it interesting for automobile fueling 49:24 so 20 kilojoules per mole that's the strength of a hydrogen bond 49:30 okay but you can't go stronger because then you have to put in heat to take it out 49:35 you can go weaker because then you can't store enough hydrogen so that's you know for those of you who are interested in 49:41 this problem we need to think of strategies of how to functionalize the interior of the moth 49:47 to increase the binding energy of hydrogen to the maf 49:52 to be to go from 13 kilojoules per mole to 20 kilojoules per mole do you think could be done or if anybody's going to 49:59 do it it's going to be in the moth field because we can control these on the molecular level okay that's that i think that that's the 50:05 key development here on a foundational at the at the fundamental is that we can 50:12 control matter in infinite direction on the atomic and molecular level 50:19 uh co2 problem is potentially more it's complex problems to solve but 50:26 it gives me even more hope that hydrogen the problem is you could divide it into two 50:32 two sides one is binding co2 from air where it exists at 50:40 around 400 ppm that's not so easy because very dilute so you have to 50:46 process a lot of air and that has its own energetic and 50:51 engineering challenges and from power plants and point sources depending on 50:56 what your power plant is burning it could be five percent co2 emission if it's burning natural gas 51:03 but if it's burning uh petroleum or or coal you you could get up to 16 of co2 51:12 in both cases you're trying to separate co2 from many other gases not the least of which is water 51:18 which competes with co2 and so and complicates things 51:23 so these are the minimum requirements for a carbon capture material you need to have 51:29 high capacity so that you're not doing many cycles you minimize the number of cycles by having 51:34 a high capacity material because every cycle demands energy water stability your material needs to be able 51:42 to be flooded in water and stable for many years in a power plant or in a device that's capturing co2 from 51:49 air oxidation stability because you you have oxygen around 51:54 and you're heating the material to remove the co2 um that the oxidation of amines and the 52:01 oxidation of the framework is very important site callability you need to be able to cycle 52:07 many many times hundreds of thousands of cycles and you need to be able to have the right 52:13 regeneration temperature you need to be able to heat your material not to hundreds of degrees 52:20 celsius but but to something that is more reasonable to lower the energy requirements 52:27 so where are we in the carbon capture world okay we are we're here there isn't 52:35 an ideal material right now they all have problems they they all have problems the aqueous 52:41 amines which have been used for 100 years to separate co2 from 52:48 methane in natural gas mining is are problematic because the regeneration temperature is high 120 degrees 52:55 they're not very recyclable can't cycle too much because they decompose and they become problems in 53:01 their own uh environmental problems and and amines are corrosive 53:06 they're liquids they're water they're they are aqueous amines and 53:12 and the heat capacity of water is high so frameworks may be better or solid better 53:19 because they have lower heat capacity carbon doesn't cut it zeolites have their own problems resins organic resins 53:27 are not bad but they do have a problem with regeneration temperature silicas 53:33 as you can see here they still have problems metal hydroxides have a they're solids they're 53:39 they have problems with high regeneration temperature maf seemed to be approaching being interesting 53:46 right as materials that could satisfy the three requirements cyclability for maf is still a challenge because after 53:53 many many cycles somehow having the metal there still affects the hydrolytic stability of the 54:00 material but that's where let me just say that's where coughs are going to fill in but we're learning 54:07 a lot about co2 capture even though moths may not may not be 54:12 the ideal materials down the road and there may be smaller applications that can withstand 54:18 lower number of cycles that moths could be useful for but but for power plant 54:23 and this large scale applications you're going to have to go with materials that are not going to hydrolyze because remember even when co2 54:30 unlike binding h2 into the pore co2 is going into the pore with water 54:37 binding to a means that you may have tethered onto the moth and and evolving its own chemistry 54:44 okay you make acids and it's constantly evolving within the pores as more and more co2 is being 54:50 pushed into the pore so it's very you have a almost like a chemical plant into the maw 54:57 and so the material has has to have a backbone that is extremely robust 55:03 onto which you can bind amines and the things that you need for the co2 selective capture 55:10 at the level where we are with moths here's a maf it's a zirconium moth and we functionalized it with a 55:16 with glycine which has a ch2 and h2 unit onto which co2 could bind from air 55:23 okay and how does this material perform in air here's 400 55:29 ppm we can reduce this is one kilogram of maf we can reduce that down to 55:36 as you can see here down to 0.02 millibar or 20 ppm so that's that's not bad you 55:44 have a material that can take this up and we can cycle it over 80 cycles 55:49 and it's fine i'm not sure how many cycles we can do 55:54 but i'm worried the flue gas is the same thing 15 co2 we can clean it down to less than percent 56:01 co2 so you see right before you a prototype 56:06 that has a maf that can selectively bind co2 and reduce the level of co2 in air or in 56:14 flue gas and it works in water and it can be cycled quite a few cycles now will it cycle 56:21 hundreds of thousands of cycles i don't know my guess is that it's going to be complicated that's why 56:27 the push should be towards coughs okay the other 56:33 problem i want to talk about is the problem of water stress in the world and 56:39 all the regions that are not yellow are experiencing water stress in one way or another 56:44 either for the lack of brain or because they're over using the underground water 56:50 so that's one third of the world as of today lives in water stress regions and 56:57 even in the water regions there's always questions about how pure is my water 57:02 and then it's also a national security problem for many countries because many of them 57:08 do import their water okay so you don't want to rely on another country for your water 57:13 um so in 2040 the un projects that this 57:18 picture will get even worse countries that you think are not water stressed or regions of countries where you think are 57:24 not more stressed like the midwest of the u.s or the east coast will be water stressed because we're overusing the 57:30 underground water much faster than it could be it could be replenished 57:36 so our idea is that the air contains a lot of water 57:42 and in fact we have almost 13 000 cubic meter kilometers of water 57:49 in air at any one time that's as much water as we have in lakes and rivers on 57:55 our planet it's a lot of water but we don't have a way to extract that 58:00 water in an energy efficient way now moths come in because you can design 58:06 the interior to have the right binding energy for water and so we think that 58:13 potentially this is something that we can address in fact water harvesting is probably the 58:19 furthest along among the hydrogen co2 problems 58:24 now there's a lot of stuff out there on harvesting water from air because this is an idea that has been around for a 58:30 thousand years okay and if you google water harvesting you'll get all these 58:36 things that people will trying to sell you as harvesting water from air and none of them work 58:43 they all work at high humidity not at the humidity levels where you really need them to work which is less than 50. 58:50 in the desert usually 20 to 30 relative humidity okay depending on the 58:56 uh time of year so these all these systems work on cooling the air down 59:03 to get the water out okay we're going to do something different 59:09 we think that if we can have a moth that extract water from desert air at low 59:14 humidity it would work anywhere in the world it will work better at higher humidity 59:21 so that's the idea that's the vision could we harvest water from air anywhere in the world at any time of the year 59:29 and to make you appreciate and so that you don't buy those equipment online 59:35 to thinking that you're going to get pure water in the middle of the desert i just want to give you an illustration 59:41 this is a psychometric chart plotting the amount of water in air versus temperature 59:46 okay if if i am in a region of the world that is here 30 where this 30 degrees c 59:55 and 20 relative humidity that's very dry okay 1:00:00 not much water is in the is in that air now for me to to get the water out of 1:00:05 that air i need to reduce the temperature down to four degrees celsius of the air 1:00:11 and dave is nodding his head because an engineer understands that very well that's energy intensive process you 1:00:17 can't make devices that you're going to sell to people and and address the water stress 1:00:24 however if i have a mop that can seek out that water pluck it out of the air concentrate it into the pore 1:00:31 now i've created humidity in my environment and i have 80 percent humidity and so for me to get that water 1:00:37 out i only need to reduce down the temperature or for me to condense that water 1:00:42 would would require me to reduce the temperature by four degrees to get the water out of that air 1:00:48 okay so in a way the moth being able to concentrate the water from air into its 1:00:53 pores creates let's say humidity in a device 1:00:59 so that you have a humid so that you take let's say arid air desert air and turn it into a 1:01:05 tropical air okay now you can get the water out much more easily that's how the moth works 1:01:11 and and i don't want to belabor the point but there's again there's a lot of fluff 1:01:16 out there about water harvesting and a lot of claims that when you look deeply into what 1:01:21 they're claiming it's not quite right okay you need to have a high capacity 1:01:28 material you need a material that can take the water in and out with great facility so that you're not putting in a 1:01:34 lot of heat to to do that and you need the material to work at low humidity otherwise we already have water 1:01:40 in in the more humidified region or it's not as urgent so there's nothing out there that works and 1:01:47 what works here is moth with the way we discovered this is that 1:01:52 we were studying the interaction of water two mobs as part of the co2 capture problem 1:01:59 and we discovered this moth to have this incredible behavior when exposed to 1:02:05 water it takes up water 20 relative humidity and it takes it up in a step 1:02:12 way and so that means for me to take the water out i can i can have a very high working 1:02:18 capacity because of the step if this was shallow your working capacity would be very low and would require more energy 1:02:26 so we discovered that you can take the water out at 45 degrees which is having 1:02:31 been born and raised in a desert environment that's the temperature during the day could go up to 45 degrees 1:02:36 so that gave me the idea that moss could be used for harvesting water from desert air 1:02:41 and indeed you can do this for many many cycles and the maf is maintained maf structures 1:02:48 many other performances maintained the only thing that we notice is that there is a slight drop in performance or an 1:02:54 uptake after the first cycle what was that and now comes why are we working so hard 1:03:01 to make crystalline materials is that it does have aside from the obsession of mike o'keefe and omar 1:03:08 yagi with crystals there is a practical thing and that is now we can dig into the structure and 1:03:14 find out where those first water molecules are residing and what's their interaction with the 1:03:19 framework it turns out the very first water molecules are bound closely to the metal oxide unit 1:03:28 and so when you're doing the cycling these i call them seeds are not removed they 1:03:33 are stuck to the metal oxide unit through strong hydrogen bonds but what you're removing are the water 1:03:39 molecules that are bound to the seed so in a way you have a an ice fragment growing inside the mouth at room 1:03:46 temperature and that's what we were cycling we were cycling the additional water molecules that are 1:03:52 bound to those to those seeds well that's great right now we have 1:03:59 figured it out and we can do better right but before that we wanted to show 1:04:05 that this thing works in the desert okay so we designed a uh 1:04:12 in collaboration with evelyn wang at mit we designed a handheld device that 1:04:17 employs two grams of water and the device works by you open the 1:04:22 device during the night for air to get into the moth water gets into the mouth you close it 1:04:28 during the day expose it to sunlight it heats up and water comes out of them off 1:04:34 and condenses on the walls and that's and you can see here the droplets of water as the interior heats up 50 60 1:04:40 degrees and so on you get the droplets are getting larger and larger okay so not much water is 1:04:47 coming out but we are only using two grams but it works it works outside the lab 1:04:54 in in this particular case this was done in in a humidity of 25 to 30 relative 1:05:00 humidity this is this experiment was done in arizona in the arizona desert and you 1:05:06 can see the droplets that were harvested from that device 1:05:12 so evelyn and i went our own way because mit gave her a whole bunch of money and said yagi can't work with you because 1:05:18 he's not an mit professor so so i said fine i mean 1:05:23 we can design a device a simple device to do this no no problem okay so 1:05:29 a berkeley device has is based on a kilogram of moth and it's a box within a 1:05:34 box okay that the outside box is your condenser the inside box has the moth it 1:05:40 works in exactly the same way desert air comes into the moth traps the water the water the moth gets saturated you close 1:05:48 the outside you expose it to sunlight and you get condensation of water as the water is moving out of the moth 1:05:54 okay from this experiment which by the way this is 1:06:00 i think this is betty's backyard right here that this box is sitting on so i called betty and i said betty we 1:06:06 need the students need to test this kilogram device in a desert environment could we borrow your backyard and betty 1:06:14 and and john were gracious to host the three students 1:06:19 and this is what the device looks like it's it's two plexiglas boxes that are you can see how asu is in my blood 1:06:26 okay so so ultimately the student i didn't tell you betty but i called them up at two 1:06:32 o'clock in the morning and they said oh the experiment is not working we see we see that the because they have probes 1:06:39 into them off and everything we see that the muff is getting saturated with water 1:06:44 but and we see it coming out as vapor but it doesn't condense 1:06:49 i said just put it under the ground put part of it under the ground and the dirt is probably two degrees three 1:06:56 degrees lower in temperature than the rest of the device it should condense and indeed then that worked right so it pays to 1:07:03 call your students at two o'clock in the morning so these are the three students who were 1:07:10 doing this experiment in betty's backyard you can see here the um 1:07:16 production is 200 milliliters to 300 milliliters that's a wrong that's a more 1:07:21 that's a a cup of water this is 236 milliliters so it's a drink of water from a kilogram 1:07:29 completely unoptimized and then we discovered that not all the moth is being used because air has to diffuse 1:07:35 further down into the cake of moff but now we've gotten a lot better as you will see in in exposing them off to um 1:07:43 all right ready yeah so this is eugene uh you met him betty 1:07:49 he drank the water without my advice 1:07:55 nice 1:08:00 the water is pure we tested the water for using the 1:08:06 fda standards for drinking water and it has no metals no organics it's it's it's distilled water okay so it 1:08:13 doesn't really taste as good as this water but to make it taste like this or even 1:08:18 better you mineralize the water all our water is mineralized it's very easy cheap 1:08:23 process so this is very very exciting because you have a material 1:08:30 a simple device you can generate water without any energy input aside from 1:08:35 ambient sunlight and we learned a lot by going to the desert and and 1:08:42 doing all those experiments and understanding all the heat transfer air flow and temperature changes that are 1:08:49 happening in the in in the device so that so then as we publish that paper 1:08:56 everybody said oh zirconium is too expensive and that's true and so we went and that's the nice thing 1:09:02 about reticular chemistry we went and designed aluminum moth aluminum is cheap 1:09:11 o'keefe had already enumerated rod-based sbus and this is one of them 1:09:17 mark 303 we designed that we we it turns out to have extraordinary 1:09:24 uh uptake and it works at ten percent relative humidity 1:09:29 and it works better than the zirconium off okay i'm i um i just want to say 1:09:34 that we took the a kilogram of that moth to the desert mojave desert 1:09:40 and you can see here the humidity in the desert at this time of the year when we tested 1:09:46 this and the uptake of water they ignore the first bar because that's the water that was in the moth when we 1:09:51 were in berkeley but this is in the in the desert and you can see that even at very low humidity 1:09:58 less than 10 percent of the humidity here or 10 percent really humidity it still picks up water 1:10:05 okay so and my students know not to return without the evidence of water real 1:10:11 evidence of water being picked up from air and so this is a video of 1:10:16 of the this is part of a longer video that shows how the water is dripping into the 1:10:21 container and from this experiment we can harvest one liter of water per 1:10:26 kilogram of moff per day at a humidity that range from 5 to 35 1:10:32 relatively humidity i said 10 percent but you see there's a very short 1:10:38 hump at the beginning that's five percent but largely the malforce at 10 but if you have 5 it does pick up some water 1:10:45 so the nice thing about this is that the mop stays in the device 1:10:52 for many years right because we've already tested this moth over 36 000 cycles and 1:10:59 it leaves the water leaves no imprint on the moth the moth 1:11:05 performance is reproducible and the very nice thing about this is that the water comes out of the pore with a great 1:11:11 facility at 85 degrees you can remove the water from the pores in less than 1:11:18 five minutes okay just a few minutes if you want if you don't want to go to 85 you can go to 60 but that means you 1:11:26 have to do more cycles or slower cycles excuse me based on that you can do an electrified 1:11:32 device like this looks complicated but it's not it's just made on the same principle 1:11:37 that i showed you before from which you can harvest uh 1:11:43 four liters of water but not kilogram of maf 200 1:11:48 grams of moff this is the water harvesting chamber door opens allows air in 1:11:53 it condenses it it's it's into the moth then the mouth is heated condenses it's collected at the bottom 1:12:00 and then you see the water filling up the the bottle there this is the water at the bottom 1:12:11 okay so let me let me just say that from this experiment 1:12:17 we you we are using 200 grams of maf in here only 200 grams and producing four 1:12:24 and depending on the weather five liters of water a day the water is ultra pure 1:12:29 because the maf is a filter molecular filter in itself and it does not 1:12:36 let's say leech any metals or organics and you can see that 1:12:42 because we can control matter on the atomic molecular level we can in not a very long time really achieve a 1:12:50 much higher productivity now we are looking at the prospect now we are here at around 80 liters per 1:12:57 kilo of maf per day we should be able to get to 100 liters per kilogram 1:13:03 of maf per day okay 1:13:08 well this is my one of my last i guess my last slide 1:13:13 if if like i said if the maf works it will work in any kind of weather because 1:13:18 if this one works at five percent mainly 10 relative humidity and so in the driest desert in the world at the driest 1:13:25 time of the year this material would pick up 1:13:31 about seven or so liters of water per day 1:13:37 for each kilogram of moth and you can do this in all parts of the world 1:13:44 okay because arid or humid whether the humidity here 1:13:50 and the temperature doesn't change based on where you are necessarily in terms of the behavior of the material 1:13:56 so that's that's where we are i think that we are realizing the um 1:14:03 the fact that you can harvest water from air anywhere at any time of the of the year 1:14:08 um the fact that these are highly crystalline allows us to incrementally 1:14:13 introduce water and then check where the water is residing inside the structure 1:14:19 and let me just zip through this and give you the video 1:14:24 so these are all based on crystallography this is one of the pores and we're going 1:14:31 to uncover the pores so that you can see where the water is going that's the 1:14:36 first absorptive size second third and fourth 1:14:42 okay and then it fills up that that's those are our seeds 1:14:48 and then it fills up now you're building an ice crystal in the pore 1:14:54 all of these positions are crystallographically uh defined 1:15:00 the reason this is exciting is that once like all chemists know do once you know 1:15:06 where what the site that you want to modify you can go in and make the binding stronger or weaker 1:15:13 okay and so we could use linker like this instead of the one with nitrogen to shift the isotherm if we 1:15:20 want towards taking water at higher humidity i don't know why you would do that if you have that maybe this is more 1:15:26 energetically favorable if indeed all your conditions are going to be around there but but more importantly 1:15:33 you can then modulate at which temperature you can take out the water 1:15:39 by crafting in which atoms are being bound to to water molecule 1:15:45 to the framework okay so this is the this is the end of my talk 1:15:51 before i get any questions about me taking water out of air and leaving us all dry 1:15:56 i just want to say that we if you serve 50 liters to each one in our population we would 1:16:02 have only used less than 0.001 percent or 2 percent of the water in the 1:16:08 atmosphere we have lots of water in the atmosphere on a fundamental level what we are doing 1:16:13 is we are making distributed water mobile of bread and of course you can personalize you can mineralize it you 1:16:19 can make it flavored if you like and it's pure pure drinking water you can you can 1:16:26 use it for household uses for agriculture and above all we can achieve hopefully water 1:16:32 independence by using this kind of methodology michael o'keefe has played a major role 1:16:38 i think in the development of beautiful structures so this is a symposium that we held for 1:16:45 beautiful structures for mike and defects for osamu who spend his lifetime working on 1:16:52 defects this this was held in vietnam part of our global science institute activities to bring in 1:16:59 people from developing countries into science and research and i just want to say that mike never 1:17:05 hesitated to jump on an airplane and go to very far places and spent a week to mentor 1:17:11 students or giving them lectures and i appreciate that very much he also um 1:17:18 has never hesitated to interact with my students in a productive way as you see here on one of the boats that they 1:17:24 surprised me for my 50th birthday with mike and there is lita keeping 1:17:30 everything in order and running smoothly thank you lita for your support 1:17:35 and asu is a very special place to me because i met some people who have really impacted my 1:17:42 life in the beginning and it had tremendous impact on my career one of them is 1:17:49 morton monk he's sitting there in the back who always said whatever you need omar i 1:17:55 will provide okay and i called upon him several times to help me and he did no hesitation it 1:18:01 takes courage to do that and it's it in the end it translates 1:18:06 into into big impact betty landon she made sure everything is in order 1:18:13 and everybody knows their age and not to exaggerate their age so thank you betty for all for your 1:18:20 friendship and all your service to our uh to our department okay 1:18:26 in the end i want to acknowledge my students in addition to those i acknowledge during my presentation 1:18:32 my our funding and partners and also say that 1:18:37 we have you have two textbooks that describe reticular chemistry one is based on structures and nets that's by 1:18:44 michael o'keefe and bruce hyde and the other one we just published in my group on an 1:18:50 introduction to reticular chemistry it's a textbook designed for undergraduates to follow the 1:18:58 synthesis structure properties and applications of of reticular chemistry and i'll end 1:19:04 with this statement from mike there has been nothing like it in the history of 1:19:10 chemistry moths coughs i think the interaction with 1:19:15 mike i think that it's uh it's been a a wonderful journey and we will continue 1:19:21 on that on that course thank you very much for your attention and for doing this 1:19:28 [Applause] 1:19:38 omar thank you spectacular presentation uh we do have a reception outside which 1:19:44 you're all invited to before we go i think it's only fair that we allow omar to answer at least a 1:19:50 couple of questions so i'd like to open the floor just for a couple of questions so please 1:19:59 peter so with this distributive production of 1:20:06 water which is a glorious idea it seems to me that there's got to be a 1:20:13 massive industrial scale synthetic job do you have an idea of the 1:20:18 scale of that and the cost of making an impact with this beautiful technology great so we understand her the question 1:20:25 is peace asking about industrial scale manufacturing of these materials well the mafs have already been you know we 1:20:32 worked with bsf for many years 17 years to show that moths can be scaled up to 1:20:37 multi-ton quantities that is already being done in water and in a synthetic procedure that allows 1:20:44 you to take the linker and the metal combine them and then get the linker and the metal 1:20:51 into the product no by-products so it's a completely 1:20:56 cyclable process and at the end of this the journey of the moth let's say in the device 1:21:02 you can add acid to the moth separate the metal from the linker and then reassemble it in water 1:21:09 in water so this has already been done and so 1:21:16 what else do we need okay do you want devices 1:21:21 that are engineered to trap water from the atmosphere using the moth where 1:21:28 the moth now is getting uh is is being placed in a 1:21:35 form it's not powdered moth in the in the device but it's placed in a form 1:21:40 that is like a coating on a substrate to maximize the exposure of the moth 1:21:47 to to air and so that you can take advantage of the full surface area that the moth provides you i just showed you 1:21:53 a device the beautiful thing about this device is that you can now correlate the molecular 1:22:00 aspects that we work so hard with with the not just the 1:22:07 substrate the mafia also but also the performance of the device 1:22:14 and the reason tiny changes into that absorptive site are very important is 1:22:20 because you're doing many cycles so even if i could improve 1:22:25 the absorption energy or the kinetics by a tiny amount that is insignificant in the 1:22:30 eyes of all chemists the device performance is improved in 1:22:35 that study i showed you 15 percent right that's a lot of that's a lot of water 1:22:41 in a in a device that we envision in that delivers 20 000 liters of water to 1:22:48 a village that just means so many more people that can get that can get water so i think in terms of 1:22:55 scalability is no different than any other new technology polymers remember polymers when they 1:23:01 were first discovered people said they're not scalable they're made from very expensive starting materials and so on but 1:23:09 if you create a need then the demand 1:23:15 the rest follows the technology works that's my point yeah 1:23:20 bloody has a question really beautiful talk 1:23:26 so i have a question you talk about application for water production 1:23:32 now the moth they have also very interesting properties when it comes to electronic and transport electric 1:23:38 transport so it and the spectronics would you comment something on that yeah 1:23:45 the questions about mafs relevance to electronics and conductivity and 1:23:51 charge charge transport we've done a lot of work on coughs in that direction 1:23:57 you can take a cough that is layered and through this stacking you can get 1:24:03 uh charge transport as good as uh graphene 1:24:10 okay so there's a lot of work being done in that in that right on conductive mafs on transport through mops 1:24:17 i think there we are looking for ways of taking the coughs and making 1:24:24 large areas of layers right so so that they could be 1:24:30 made useful in electronic applications and the applications that you're suggesting 1:24:38 so i would say that just depends on the building units and there's a lot of work that's being done there 1:24:44 you wanna don't i have a technical question the most beautiful though 1:24:49 um about hydrogen storage i'm a little bit confused so uh by 1:24:55 making this interplanetary natural structure i thought you wanted to increase the capacity but then actually 1:25:01 heat of air option increased so no no the heat absorption no i didn't i 1:25:08 was not clear the question is about the inter penetration whether that increase the heat of adsorption that that's not 1:25:14 actually true well the heat of absorption is the absorption is the energy of the hydrogen onto the 1:25:20 framework by doubling the up the by by doubling inter interpenetrating 1:25:25 that structure i close that open space that's not doing me any good right because the wall because the 1:25:32 hydrogen is no is not interacting with the surface and so it's still as if the 1:25:37 hydrogen is outside the moth so by introducing 1:25:42 another framework in now i've introduced more absorptive sites just like the ones 1:25:47 i already had but filling up that volume the absorption energy does not increase 1:25:53 in that situation because the nature of the absorption sites are exactly the same they just doubled yeah 1:25:59 yeah okay uh well actually i think we'll get petra 1:26:04 the last question and then omar is going to be outside we can ask questions of omar then so petra police 1:26:11 imagine that you can bring water to the villages but you have no electricity and no water so but when you 1:26:18 ideally would be your heating cooling device so then how you imagine we get electricity 1:26:24 for driving devices and start shooting panels or because 1:26:30 the more complicated the devices and the lower is the living time i think if you're you know good 1:26:37 question the question is about how are you going to use this device without elixir without 1:26:43 electricity in remote areas where there's no electric but i mean i showed you in the arizona device 1:26:50 that you could do this without without input of power aside from sunlight the 1:26:56 way the door can open and close engineers have materials that have actuators that could they could do that 1:27:02 depending on temperature so i think it's doable but i i just showed you how i can 1:27:09 harvest from one kilogram unoptimized and not all the kilogram is being used one cup 1:27:15 of water a day this could be a device sitting in a corner somewhere 100 kilos of this stuff 1:27:20 sitting in a corner some someplace and constantly harvesting water it could be significant for remote 1:27:26 areas in fact i feel like that application is much more impactful in the long run 1:27:31 because of the the fact that it's running on ambient sunlight um much more than the electrified device 1:27:39 but in yeah 1:27:46 because it was not on the ground one idea would be to vary let's say two thirds of the devices 1:27:52 exactly so then you could also do this practically you would you would have it in the column 1:27:58 and then you would would release the water practically in the sunshine exposing and this would 1:28:05 knock even in the desert because if you go deeper in the mountains yeah i mean i think that that's that's really 1:28:12 the idea i'm not suggesting that we could just take that box with a box within a box and put it 1:28:17 out there i'm just showing that the feasibility of that but there is some engineering that has to be 1:28:24 done but not requiring power that that needs to happen in order for this to work in a 1:28:30 uh you know in a reliable device yeah reliable meaning that the mechanics of 1:28:37 it is is not nothing's gonna break and it does not require constant maintenance 1:28:42 you know okay i think we should thank omar again 1:28:47 for absolutely spectacular presentation 1:28:56 you thanks Follow along using the transcript. 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The Origin of Life: Not as Hard as it Looks? Jack Szosta, Spring 2023 Ey...

The Origin of Life: Not as Hard as it Looks? Jack Szosta, Spring 2023 Eyring Lecturer ASU School of Molecular Sciences 1.47K subscribers Subscribe 1K Share Download Save 62,267 views Mar 17, 2023 #chemistry #research Nobel laureate Jack Szostak from University of Chicago delivered the Eyring General Lecture on March 17, 2023 at Arizona State University. Please click here to learn more about Dr. Szosta and the distinguished Eyring Lecture Series at ASU. https://news.asu.edu/20230309-nobel-l... #chemistry #research ‪@arizonastateuniversity‬ ‪@ASUNews‬ Transcript Follow along using the transcript. Show transcript Transcript Search in video 0:00 evening can you hear me 0:09 Welcome to the latest in the series of hiring lectures 0:20 the series is named in honor of Professor Leroy hearing iring who was an 0:27 ASU Regents professor and chairman of the department and contributed importantly during his tenure as 0:33 chairman to the the growing reputation and Excellence of the department 0:38 today's speaker is Professor Jack shostak uh Jack is a university professor and 0:47 professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago and an investigator at the Howard Hughes 0:52 Medical Institute prior to this year uh Jack was uh an 0:58 employee at Harvard University and at Harvard Medical School he had multiple 1:03 appointments at Harvard and carried out all of his duties with in a 1:09 distinguished fashion uh his uh training was initially at McGill University for his bachelor's 1:16 degree and then he moved to to Cornell and worked with uh um Ray Wu on his uh 1:23 PhD thesis subject uh thereafter uh he uh he started his uh career uh all in 1:30 the Boston area uh had a number of positions over a period of years at the 1:35 Farber Cancer Center Harvard Medical School uh and then at Mass general uh and uh while he was there he carried 1:44 out a few things that some of you've probably heard about um so uh he uh for example 1:52 worked on genetics and biochemistry of DNA recombination uh which led to the 1:58 double strand break repair model for mentotic recombination uh in parallel he 2:05 made fundamental contributions to our understanding of telomere structure and function uh and uh the role of the telomere 2:12 maintenance in preventing cellular senescence for this work I've been sharing it with two other individuals he 2:19 was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work most people would be satisfied with that 2:25 Jack went on to just as remarkable things in more recent 2:30 years I'll abbreviate it uh for this particular introduction since I have to 2:37 introduce him again tomorrow and I'll talk about it in more detail then but in the 1990s uh Jack and his 2:44 colleagues developed in vitro selection as a tool for the isolation of functional RNA DNA and proteins 2:51 simple concept but incredibly powerful defined molecules with respect 2:58 and special activity of function uh even though it's a discovery of a few decades 3:05 now it's still increasing in in its utilization and the extent to which the world relies on that basic technique to 3:13 to find uh new and highly potent and selective molecules for for uh specific 3:19 uh utilizations um since the year 2000 approximately his 3:27 research interests have focused on self-replicating systems and the origin of life and this leads us immediately to 3:34 the title of this evening's lecture namely the origin of life not as hard as 3:40 it looks please join me in welcoming Jack 3:52 and thank you very much uh secretary very uh kind introduction thanks for 3:58 inviting me to uh come back to ASU and and talk to people 4:04 again I've had a great day talking with uh lots of different people about all kinds of exciting new things 4:12 so um so in in today's lecture I'm going to 4:17 try to give a not a comprehensive overview of the origin of life but sort of focus on some 4:24 of the things that I find particularly interesting and and 4:30 maybe try to give some idea of where we've made progress and what kinds 4:37 of things of held us back from say maybe moving as 4:42 quickly as as we would like so what you see on the slide here is 4:48 just a schematic of our conception of what a really simple primordial cell 4:54 motive look like just a kind of a lipid envelope with some small bits of genetic 5:00 information on the inside and this looks simple I mean it's 5:06 obviously a stripped down version of a modern cell it's got the important things except for proteins 5:13 um but you know there's an enormous number of questions that arise if you 5:18 try to think about how something like this could have emerged from the chemistry of the early Earth 5:25 and then even if you get to this stage then what right how did it lead subsequently 5:32 um to the evolution of more and more complex forms of life 5:38 so uh I was talking to a few people before giving this lecture and they said that 5:46 you know it's always interesting for people to hear how you got into a field so I'll try to bring that out a bit 5:53 um I I talked I thought about different ways of beginning this talk 5:58 and you know I could have you know 6:04 you know everything of course worked before well we were setting up but now I can't 6:11 advance uh site 6:17 okay I can use this good all right okay so I thought about 6:23 Beginning by talking about exoplanets because after all that's been one of the 6:29 just most amazing advances in science in the last two decades we have catalog now 6:34 of over 5 000 planets orbiting different Stars they're must by extrapolation the 6:41 millions of very earth-like planets out there in our galaxy alone and of course we'd all like to know if there's life on 6:49 any of those planets or is it so hard to get to life that maybe we're the only 6:55 place in the Galaxy or even the universe or this life but 7:01 I'm not going to talk more about that I'm going to instead I I also thought well you know I could talk about 7:08 life being a far from equilibrium phenomenon right and it's there's so 7:13 many interesting questions how does how does that generate local order of 7:19 the kind that you see in life like these incredibly complicated metabolic pathways and everything depends on the 7:26 input of energy into the system in the in the right way but you know you have uh uh Paul Davies and Sarah Walker here 7:34 who can tell you all about that uh from their work so instead I decided to 7:41 talk about life from the point of view of information because that's really how 7:46 I got into this field and got interested and and obsessed with it really 7:53 so when we talk about information uh it can be talked about in a lot of 7:59 different ways right so this obviously goes back sorry I'm in trouble with this to 8:05 um you know at the beginning from from Shannon classical information Theory how much information does it take to 8:12 specify a given string of symbols and then 8:19 that led to advances in compression technology which 8:24 I think mostly stem from comogarov algorithms which is how much what's the shortest 8:31 like algorithm or computer program do you that can actually 8:37 regenerate a given string but in biology we don't really care 8:43 so much about the actual sequence of symbols in the string right I mean we 8:51 all have about three billion base pairs of information in our DNA and it's not 8:56 really that much it's prepared on your smartphones right but what's important about it is are the 9:04 parts of it that actually code for something useful and even those parts 9:09 the exact sequence is not usually what's important right because there are many positions in the sequence that don't 9:16 matter that can be anything there are others that Co vary and so the actual 9:21 amount of information to specify say a given functional TRNA or given 9:27 functional protein is is less and even that is not exactly what you 9:35 need or should be thinking about in a biological system and just like in a conversation between 9:42 two people what matters is the meaning of the string right and physical 9:47 complexity doesn't quite get to that because there are many many different 9:52 ways of building different structures that do the same thing 9:58 okay and so that means in effect it takes less information to specify a given meaning in a 10:05 biological system okay so uh okay not these are dead horse 10:12 but there's this obvious parallel between the information stored in in DNA and in long-term storage on computers 10:19 and in biology we have this sort of more transient uh form of RNA which by the 10:26 way also does all kinds of functions just like proteins and and so on and so 10:31 it's very parallel to what we see in all these sort of built devices and so I've been interested for a long 10:38 time in how did the first organisms 10:45 begin to accumulate information about their environment about themselves and 10:51 about how they function in the environment where did that information come from and how did it grow to the 10:58 extent that we see in biology today okay um so the way that I got into that was 11:06 essentially by doing darwinian evolutionary experiments 11:11 on molecules instead of on collections of organisms so 11:17 their winning Evolution has been operating for billions of years and has generated all the diversity of life that 11:23 we see humans if they're doing directed Evolution for thousands probably maybe 11:29 tens of thousands of years in animal and plant breeding um 11:34 and also it really took to sort of extrapolate that from organisms to 11:40 molecules was the technology of patient VCR 11:47 so the experiments that we started doing were to begin with completely a library 11:52 of completely random sequences okay a very large 11:58 sequences and what we wanted to know is How likely is it that a given random 12:06 sequence can actually do something interesting and as an experimenter of course you can 12:12 you can Define the task that will be binding to a Target molecule could be 12:17 catalyzing a reaction I want to know how much information does it take to 12:23 specify a functional molecule and one of the reasons that I decided to 12:30 through this experiment was that by talking to different people I got vastly different answers some people thought 12:37 that oh you can get an RNA molecule to bind to Target it'll be like maybe one 12:42 in ten to the minus thefts random sequences others said no building a structure is like really hard and you 12:48 have so many factors to contribute it'll be like one in ten to the minus 50. so you'll never find one experimental so 12:55 there's 45 orders of magnitude of uncertainty it seemed like worth doing an experiment see if we could narrow it 13:01 down a bit so what we were able to do pretty easily was build libraries of on the order of 13:09 10 to the 15th different random sequences made in DNA transcribed into 13:15 RNA and then take that set of sequences and subject it 13:21 to a selection okay so enriching for the ones that do what we want and throwing away the ones 13:28 that don't and then amplifying those survivors with or without adding a little bit more variation and going 13:35 around and around this cycle 13:41 going around and around that cycle uh until the population is taken over by 13:46 molecules that do uh what we want okay 13:52 okay and and so the answer was that we could actually this actually worked and 13:59 we could get molecules like the one shown here so this is 14:04 uh sort of surface view of the three-dimensional structure of a short bit of RNA that folds up and it makes 14:10 this beautiful three-dimensional shape that has a little cleft on the surface 14:16 that's complementary in shape and electrostatics to ATP so the combined 14:21 ATP at a concentration that's biologically relevant and this was at 14:27 about one in ten to the minus 10 of the random sequences that we started with so 14:33 actually not that hard to get functional sequences out of out of nothing right 14:39 so then I got interested in taking this one step further and 14:45 saying okay this you know this molecule binds with a certain affinity and specificity how much harder is it to 14:53 bind something more tightly right intuitively it's you know to do any task 15:01 more efficiently it's it's harder and so it should take more information the 15:06 question is how much and so to get at that we embarked 15:11 um on a a series of really painful and tedious and laborious experiments that 15:16 were done by James Carruthers when he was a graduate student in my lab and what James did was to select for RNA 15:25 sequences out of this random tool that could bind GTP as a Target 15:31 and he got a whole bunch of different solutions and what I'm showing you on this slide 15:36 are the simplest looking Solutions they're just stem loops the red bases 15:43 have to be what they are the blue ones can be anything and so there's a certain amount of uh 15:50 information in the sense of the Chris adami type of physical complexity that 15:57 is required to specify each of these structures but if you select for Tighter and 16:05 Tighter and Tighter binding then you end up getting more complicated structures so these are a little bit more 16:11 complicated and if you keep going you get these ones which bind a hundred 16:16 times Tighter and they're much more complicated in their secondary structures than in the number of bases 16:23 that have to be what they are and so you can actually you can do the same kind of 16:29 experiment selecting for catalysis so this came out of an experiment that 16:34 was done by Dave Bartel when he was a graduate student in the lab selected for 16:39 riboslines RNA enzymes that could catalyze a ligation reaction and again he got more than one answer to that 16:47 problem and I'm showing you here one ribosome that's fairly small and simple that does 16:53 this reaction with a certain rate and this much more complicated reaction that does a much better job it's a better 17:00 Catalyst and it's more complicated you can see it takes more information to 17:05 specify the sequence that does something better okay all right now can you quantify that 17:13 and well sort of right so if you calculate the information required to 17:19 specify all of those structures and plot it against either the Affinity or the catalytic rate 17:26 there is a lot of scatter about this line but you know 17:32 you'd expect a lot of scouter and the basic lesson is that it takes 17:38 um about 10 more bits of information 17:44 um to specify about a tenfold increase in 17:49 activity and I so this is a very old result 17:57 and I've always wanted to improve on this but the experiments back then 20 to 18:03 30 years ago were so hard that no one's ever wanted to go back and do this again 18:08 but I'm still fascinated by the idea of trying to quantify the relationship 18:13 between information and meaning or function we can also do these kinds of things 18:20 with DNA and with proteins and this is just a pretty picture of how you can 18:27 use the ribosomal Machinery to as the ribosome is reading a messenger RNA 18:34 and generating a Mason peptide chain you can trick it into linking these things covalently this allows you to select for 18:42 function on the basis of what the protein is doing but it drags along its coding messenger RNA so you can tell 18:49 what you got uh and unfortunately so so this one lesson from this is again it's not that 18:55 hard to find functional molecules okay which is a good thing because otherwise I think it would be very hard 19:01 for life to evolve new functions to become more complex to adapt better to its environment in a small scale lab 19:10 experiment we were able to make new proteins that bind for example ATP and 19:15 other people have evolved catalysts this way so 19:21 um so I think this kind of give you some insight into how the first living 19:27 systems got the initial information the way we think about it is that through the cells 19:34 like in that schematic are showed in the very first slide could have been seeded with just random 19:41 sequence bits of for example RNA or whatever the primordial genetic material 19:47 was probably argument and if you have enough of those right some of those sequences carry meaning 19:55 intrinsically and could do something that would help that cell survive better 20:00 or replicate better take over the population and that's the beginnings of 20:06 darwinian evolution okay but to do that requires a few more things 20:15 right it's all in the details like okay to do this kind of acquisition of 20:21 information you have to be able to replicate that genetic material and that has to happen 20:28 with errors so that new variation is possible and it has to happen in a way that 20:35 selection can occur so how can all of those things happen 20:41 so if you look at a modern cell it's very hard to think about how that could 20:48 ever arise right because we have DNA storing information in an archival 20:54 form rnas and intermediate generating proteins that do all the functions in 21:01 the cell and the problem is that all of these things depend on each other right so you 21:08 need RNA and proteins and metabolites to replicate DNA you need DNA to encode the 21:14 RNA you can't make proteins let's say the RNA and the coated and the archival 21:19 information and the metabolites so you know trying to think in a rational way 21:25 about how a system like this could have emerged as I held back progress in understanding 21:32 the origin of life for decades right because people were generating all kinds 21:37 of crazy theories about every how everything could just emerge at once which 21:44 is basically not possible and there's a clue in the structure of this diagram 21:51 that maybe RNA this molecule in the middle is is the answer to that that to 21:58 that sort of paradox um and that was recognized in the 60s by 22:04 a few smart people like Francis Crick and Leslie orgale and Carl Lewis more recently 22:11 um the structure of the ribosome was solved by several groups and I'm showing you here a picture 22:17 of uh the large subunitive the ribosome from work by Tom Stites 22:23 and what this is a huge and complicated molecular machine right whose job is to 22:29 make all of the proteins in our body and if you look at this sort of face-on 22:34 view of the large subunit of the ribosome which is the one that actually catalyzes peptide bond formation 22:41 what you see in the very Middle where this little green squiggle is this is a 22:47 transition state analog that is occupying the catalytic center of the ribosome 22:55 all around that is only RNA which are these gray squiggles the proteins of the 23:00 ribosome are these gold structures but it's clear from the 23:06 structure that the ribosome is a ribosyme that makes proteins so all 23:13 the proteins in all the organisms in the world are made by catalysis by RNA molecules the large 23:21 subunit it's a ribosome so logically the only the conclusion we draw from that is 23:29 that RNA came first and that early life was a lot simpler 23:35 um so we imagine primitive cells looking kind of like 23:40 this still cells as a membrane boundary inside RNA as the genetic material 23:49 um encoding for ribosomes that carry out different kinds of functions including 23:54 the replication of the RNA okay so now our problem of how 24:02 to get to this point has become a lot simpler right all we have to do all is 24:07 figure out how to go from the chemistry of the early Earth to RNA molecules and then figure out how 24:14 they could replicate and develop to this stage so we can deal with other 24:19 complexities of Modern Life DNA proteins metabolism 24:27 all of that you can think of as phenomenon that arose through the 24:32 process of darwinian evolution they're evolved features they don't have to be 24:37 there from the very beginning all right so when could this have 24:43 happened so this is uh adapted from a review by Jerry Joyce I think you can take all the 24:50 numbers on the timeline with a grain of salt obviously the Earth had to cool down 24:57 from its molten lava surface to the point where you 25:02 could have water on the on on the surf with liquid water on the surface 25:07 there's evidence from the chemistry of zircon crystals that that was actually 25:13 pretty early maybe maybe as little as 100 million years after the Earth was actually formed or after the moon 25:20 forming impact uh and then somewhere between that period and the earliest 25:28 convincing evidence of life on the earth there's a period of about seven or eight 25:33 hundred million years so somewhere in there life got started we don't know when 25:38 but there must have been chemistry going on on the surface of the planet that gave rise to all the building blocks of 25:46 biology very nucleotides lipids sugars amino acids all made by just 25:55 chemistry happening in different environments on the surface of the young planet 26:00 and then somehow that gave rise to RNA which gave 26:06 rise to replicating RNA and eventually to the first cells of the RNA world and 26:13 then the RNA World evolved the ability to make all kinds of complexity and adaptation 26:19 okay so so then the problem is now 26:25 simpler no I wouldn't say simple but it's it's simpler right we can ask how did this RNA based type of Life emerge 26:33 from the chemistry of the early Earth and you can talk actually to 26:39 more than a few uh synthetic organic chemists and they'll say that is just completely ridiculous 26:46 um and I think the preconception that doing complicated multi-step 26:54 Pathways that give rise to a complicated and delicate product like the 27:00 preconception or the bias that that's impossible has also held back the field 27:05 for a long time and it's only in the last I'd say 10 or 20 years that we're starting to actually 27:12 address that problem head on and think about well how can you overcome the problems right the idea that 27:20 that life emerged from this primordial soup where everything was mixed together and sort of magically assembled into 27:27 cells is completely um ludicrous and people now are developing 27:34 uh ideas doing experiments and showing that there are ways to break down long 27:40 Pathways into shorter subsets there are ways of concentrating materials that you 27:46 need crystallizing intermediates there's a this buzzword of systems chemistry which 27:54 means thinking about things in a bit a little bit of a different way instead of you know mixing A and B and trying to 28:00 get only C you you say well what else have to be around and can you make use of other things that were present to 28:07 actually give you the products that you want so so so 28:13 um what I would say is so you've probably all heard about the famous military experiment right so Stanley 28:19 Miller is a graduate student with Harold Geary um passed an electric discharge through a 28:26 reducing atmosphere what they thought the atmosphere of the earlier looked like and found 28:33 precursors to amino acids were generated and so at the time it was revolutionary 28:41 right it said that making at least this subset of building blocks of biology is not that hard and and I think there's a 28:48 period where people thought well maybe everything uh will be that that easy and and that 28:55 uh there were a few examples that that raised that hope again so for example 29:01 one a row uh showed that you could take hydrogen cyanide all right and just uh reflux it in water 29:08 just boil it in water and and make adenine that means just a pentamer of hydrogen cyanide and and so people 29:15 started to think well maybe maybe all of the steps in making all the building blocks will be easy 29:21 and then things kind of stalled because people realized well in these reactions in the 29:28 Miller type reactions in in this Oro type of reaction what you actually make is a mess right there are often 29:36 thousands of products and they're all present at parts per million or parts per billion the more sensitive your 29:42 techniques are the more you see there but the but the way to build biology is 29:47 to make a lot just a few compounds just the ones we need right and so that's the real 29:54 problem and that's where progress has been made in Prebiotic chemistry uh in 30:00 recent years now this idea of cyanide is the ideal 30:05 building block is something I really love um you know partly because there's a certain irony in in cyanide giving rise 30:13 to life but uh I kind of like that there are lots of different ways to make cyanide in in in the atmosphere 30:21 we don't really know what what is the most uh important quantitatively 30:29 um but it's pretty clear that you can make HCM and it can rain out onto the 30:34 surface and and my colleague John Sutherland and others have figured out 30:40 very elegant ways to to make use of cyanide to efficiently generate the right product 30:47 molecules but there is a problem in the cyanide that's generated in the 30:53 atmosphere can dissolve in raindrops and render the surface but it's going to be very dilute 31:00 right very dilute cyanide doesn't do anything interesting it just sits there 31:05 and hydrolyzes it's a formabide ammonium formate and then you have nothing 31:11 so how can you actually make use of the cyanide that would be generated in the 31:17 atmosphere and um so John came up with this very uh 31:22 elegant idea that cyanide could rain out into surface lakes and if you're in a region where 31:31 there's hydrothermal circulation of the water through fractured Rock 31:36 for example volcanic regions like like you see in Yellowstone today or impact 31:42 craters what can happen is this Lake water will circulate it will percolate down it will 31:49 be heated by the underlying magma Reservoir and then rise back up to the surface 31:55 carrying with it ions that have been leached from The Rock and Prime among those will be iron iron two 32:03 and iron two reacts very rapidly and avidly with cyanide to make ferrocyanide 32:11 and the idea was that ferrocyanide salts could build up in concentration they're 32:16 a stable very stable form of cyanide could build up and precipitate out and 32:24 and you could build up over maybe thousands of years layers of sediment highly enriched in 32:30 ferrocyanide cells and this idea has been refined very nicely by recent work from 32:37 David kotlin at the University of Washington in Seattle tuition uh that that this actually can 32:45 work in very nicely in alkaline carbonate Lakes which are again a likely 32:51 Prebiotic type of environment so I think this is kind of a major 32:57 conceptual breakthrough right you start with something that's very dilute that you can't use you figure out how to 33:03 build up a concentrated reservoir of material that at later times can be 33:08 thermally processed and then can go on and do subsequent reactions but going from cyanide to nucleotides 33:16 the building blocks of RNA that's a complicated process right there's a lot of steps to go from 33:23 something as simple as cyanide to something as complicated as the nucleotide so how could that happen 33:30 and again I think one of the real conceptual breakthroughs has been in realizing 33:37 that some of the intermediates on the on these pathways 33:43 tend to selectively crystallize out and this is a particularly beautiful example 33:50 um so this is a crystal from a paper by Donna Blackman 33:55 um this compound is ribose amino oxalene which is a one of the key intermediates on the way to making all of the 34:02 nucleotides so the idea is that the reaction that generates this molecule 34:07 generates the one we want plus a bunch of side products right but the one we want 34:13 crystallizes out we can build up a reservoir we can wash away all the impurities and then at some later time 34:20 when conditions change you're ready to go on to the next step in the pathway 34:26 okay so I'm not going to go into any more detail on the Prebiotic the 34:31 pathways kind of because I want to talk about so what came next okay so so back to how to make RNA which 34:39 we have to we really have to understand right because this is going to be the basis of primordial heredity and 34:45 evolution okay so we're going from cyanide through a pathway to making nucleotides uh 34:52 nucleotides when their phosphate is chemically activated something I'll talk about a little bit 34:59 uh later and more tomorrow you can make short chains of RNA 35:04 and then making the complementary strands you have a duplex a double-stranded RNA is is a little bit 35:12 more complicated but that's a step that we've worked on in my lab I mean I think a fair bit of progress on recently 35:19 so um 35:28 really is this a really nice movie 35:34 um I don't know any idea how to start the movie 35:47 Bitcoin is a mysteries of science so you can test everything and it always works perfectly and then it comes to the real 35:53 thing and nothing works 35:58 okay well we can skip this one but the next couple I really need so hopefully 36:04 we can figure this out yeah 36:17 okay well I can't show you the structure it's a beautiful elegant structure and I 36:22 think it's really incredible that you can actually assemble it just using chemistry and with no fancy evil enzymes 36:30 so one of the huge advances again a conceptual advance 36:36 in how to do that came from the late Leslie O'Dell who's really one of the uh 36:41 founding fathers of the whole field of Prebiotic chemistry and what Leslie realized was that 36:49 thinking about how biology does this is it can be misleading right and so so 36:55 in biology the molecules that are used by enzymes to make RNA and DNA are 37:03 nucleoside triphosphate so they all have this chain of three phosphates and these are great substrates when you have an 37:10 enzyme that's a really good Catalyst right if you don't have an enzyme if you're trying to let things happen 37:17 spontaneously these molecules just sit there and they don't do anything and 37:22 what Leslie realized is you need to make things that are more reactive and she explored a lot of possibilities and in 37:30 by the early 1980s had settled on these molecules like what you see here these 37:35 are phosphor midazolides and they're chemically reactive enough to start polymerizing all by themselves without 37:42 an answer and to some extent they can polymerize on a template and build up a 37:47 copy of that now uh we've had some advances in the chemistry 37:54 recently that make this work better um and and I'll talk more about that a 38:00 little bit later and tomorrow but first I wanted to just mention another kind of preconception that I say 38:08 held back progress for a long time and again it came from thinking that how 38:13 does all this template copying the synthesis of long polymers how does it work in biology 38:20 right so in biology we always have a primer that will bind by Watson Creek 38:26 base pairing to a template Strand and the enzyme comes along and uses these 38:32 monomers as substrates and incorporates them one at a time to grow the chain the 38:38 complementary sequence and so for a long time everybody who is 38:45 trying to do this kind of copying chemistry without enzymes figured it had to work 38:51 like this right you have a primary you extend it one base at a time we thought 38:56 well this is maybe too simplistic for Prebiotic system or a primordial system 39:02 we thought of well maybe you can make it a little bit Messier by having a whole 39:07 bunch of primers scattered along the sequence and then extend them a bit join them all together that seems like a move 39:14 in the right direction uh but uh turns out it's not enough 39:20 so okay here's another uh really it came out seem to play any of 39:30 the movies which is really sad huh 39:38 uh let's say some true 39:44 uh okay I do I really do that actually 39:52 yeah you can just turn off the laser pointer maybe we can 40:03 sorry about this 40:16 oh all right yay okay so this is how 40:22 we're thinking about things when I started to work on them so imagine a little bit of RNA floating around and 40:28 really chemically Rich environment and activated monomers coming in finding 40:34 their partner by base pairing and building up a complementary strand okay 40:39 so it seems easy and beautiful when you see these animations that were made by 40:44 Janet dewasa but when you try to do the chemistry it turns out to be not so great 40:49 and there's a whole list of problems here just trying to get that to work 40:55 experimentally and what I can say at this point is that 41:01 we've solved most of these we're still working on optimizing a few but I think 41:08 we're pretty good now at doing copying chemistry and so I'm just going to show you one 41:16 thing about that that illustrates how a bias a preconception can get in 41:23 the way okay so this is the way copying a template actually works using these 41:28 reactive building blocks so we thought at the beginning we would have this so 41:34 this is a primer that's bound to a template we want to copy this part of the template we saw monomers would come 41:40 in one at a time sit down on the template react with the primer which would grow by one unit and then we 41:47 repeat that process until we built up the full copy so it turns out doesn't 41:53 work that way and so for the Chemists in the audience you can look at the right hand side here 42:00 for the rest you can get the schematic view here what happens is that two 42:05 monomers react with each other they make this bizarre 42:11 dinucleotide this dimeric product this binds to the template by two Luts 42:17 and Crick base stairs and what's really amazing is that the structure of the 42:23 bridge the linkage between the two monomers is perfectly set up in 42:29 three-dimensional space so that the reaction goes really quickly 42:35 and and so it really took us a while to overcome this idea that popping had to 42:41 work like it does in biology but apparently we now think that primitive copying worked in this chemically 42:48 distinct way and only later when enzymes ribosomes or enzymes evolve did we get 42:54 to the modern way of doing things okay now 42:59 that's good for copying a template but what we need in order to do evolution is 43:06 to actually replicate that we've got to make copy the template and copy the copies copy those copies indefinitely 43:12 right and that turns out to be really hard for a lot of different 43:18 reasons and so uh one of the one of the uh 43:24 things that happened over the course of the pandemic was my lab was shut down for a while like everybody's and so it 43:30 had nothing to do except stay home and think and came up with this uh model that you 43:37 see here called the virtual circular genome model which we think is a way of 43:42 actually replicating RNA sequences that overcomes all of the problems that had 43:49 blocked us for so long and so the idea is the Genome of a primitive cell would be 43:56 this green circular sequence right so this is an RNA sequence just shown as a line 44:03 but there's no actual circular molecules the idea is you have a whole bunch of little pieces little fragments that map 44:11 to the circular sequence okay and the result is they can come together in all 44:16 kinds of different configurations and whenever they come together in a like 44:22 this you can extend one using the other is template so the the difference is 44:28 that now replicate the active replication has become distributed across the whole circular sequence 44:34 instead of working like it does in biology where you start at the beginning you go through the middle and you get to 44:41 the end here you do a little bit of copying all over the place that's everything everywhere all at once 44:49 and we're starting to test it and it's I think it's looking pretty exciting and 44:55 figuring out exactly how to get this to work and under what conditions is is one of the big things that were that we're 45:02 working on now okay so if we can get that to work 45:07 then we're we should be much closer to being able to actually build protocols 45:13 like you see here so little membrane sacs that include bits of RNA but with 45:19 the chemistry to actually drive replication okay so I haven't said anything 45:27 it's the membrane that encloses us and that also has to grow and divide right we want to have a primitive cell systems 45:33 go to be able to grow and divide and do that forever also and so we started working 45:40 on that uh about 20 years ago actually and I was pretty nervous about getting 45:47 into this field because I'd never worked on lipids and the Technologies for working with lipids are not as easy or 45:55 uh um how should I say effective as the technologists are working on nucleic 46:01 acids so but it's turned out to be a fascinating uh Venture and I've learned 46:08 a lot of biophysics and one of the nice things is you use microscopy to get 46:13 beautiful images so like what you see here is when a vesicle made of a simple fatty acid oleic acid you just shake it 46:21 up in water under the right conditions and it spontaneously makes beautiful membrane structures and here you can see 46:27 smaller vesicles trapped inside a big one they're really really quite beautiful 46:33 but they also have the amazing property that they can grow in very interesting 46:39 ways and so what I'm going to show you here's another movie this is one of these vesicles it's encapsulating a 46:46 fluorescent dye which is what you can actually see we had food which is more fatty acids 46:52 and it grows like in this really an unexpected way right I almost fell 47:00 off my chair when I saw this the first time this is there's a whole series of experiments that were done by Ting 47:05 tingju when he was a graduate student in the lab so it turns out that uh if you have 47:13 these vesicles that are kind of complex and they have multiple membrane layers you can throw in more of the building 47:19 blocks of the membrane fatty acids in this case still and get incorporated into the membrane which will grow and 47:25 will grow in this unusual way into filaments which we kind of understand 47:31 but not completely these are very fragile so they can break down to 47:36 smaller the other vesicles which can grow and the cycle can repeat but then in more recent years we came up 47:43 with a completely different way that this can happen and this is work that was done uh by Stephanie Zhang a 47:50 graduate student and Anna Wang when she was a was stuck in the lab and here we're making much bigger 47:58 vesicles but they only have a single membrane we start to feed them with 48:05 um with more fatty acids and what you'll 48:11 see we look carefully is that this this the spherical structures start to 48:17 fluctuate and and they stick to spontaneously divide 48:22 okay so it turns out we have two completely different ways now of driving growth in 48:28 division that works basically very with very simple physics and with 48:34 it's just soap and water there's nothing elaborate or fancy 48:41 for the center okay so so some of the things that we thought were like super 48:47 hard I had no idea how we were going to get growth in division turn out at least in some cases to be really easy 48:54 and um whereas some of the other things like doing RNA synthesis and replication 49:00 we're still working okay so I think putting those things together is getting us closer and closer to being 49:07 able to build in the lab A system that can grow and divide and evolve which is 49:12 what we really want to see uh and if we can do that that would be I think giving us some understanding 49:19 not necessarily of how life actually evolved but at least how it could have written okay so I'm almost done I just 49:26 want to am by saying a few words about the origin of coated protein synthesis 49:32 so a lot of people think that you know I mean protein synthesis is universal in 49:39 Life as we know it now um and and so it's obviously Central and 49:45 it's important uh so it's it's it would be nice to understand how a system that 49:51 complicated could have Arisen spontaneously by evolution and I the way I think of it is that 49:58 there are kind of Threes major mysteries about this process the one that almost everybody likes to 50:05 think about is the origin of the genetic code right how did certain amino acids become associated with certain uh 50:12 three-letter RNA sequences I'm not going to talk about that I have no idea 50:17 arose but I think there are two other equally important questions 50:24 so the ribosome that machine that builds proteins 50:30 uses very special substrates right it builds proteins using RNA molecules 50:36 which have an amino acid attached to them you could not evolve the ribosome unless 50:42 molecules like that were already around why on Earth would Amino isolated rnas 50:48 have been around and so we think maybe they were doing 50:53 something else before they were involved in protein synthesis and that led to the emergence of perhaps 51:01 ribosomes that that made them more efficiently and with specificity so that 51:07 a given amino acid would be attached to a given RNA that would set the stage for the 51:13 evolution of protein synthesis the other thing we're starting to think about is the other requirement for evolution 51:21 you couldn't evolve the ribosome again unless the thing that it made is useful 51:26 right it has to contribute to the survival the growth of the cell that 51:31 it's in and what could that function again we really have no idea I mean there are 51:37 a few possibilities but it's completely up in the air okay so so let me just uh so it's just a 51:44 diagram showing how the way the ribosome works you know your rnas trnas that have 51:50 an amino acid attached they come in the ribosome hooks things together builds the growing chain kicks out the empty 51:57 tRNA when it's done so why would you have molecules like this around 52:03 Okay so we think that these Amino isolated rnas 52:09 might have been doing something else what could that have been Well turns out that 52:16 um the amine of the amino acid if it's not protonated like it's drawn 52:22 here sorry uh is a good nucleophile it's more reactive it can attack activated 52:28 phosphates and it turns out that it can facilitate the Assembly of little bits 52:34 of RNA into more complicated structures which can be RI designs 52:40 so we think there could have been an early role for these molecules in 52:45 Building Up structures and then that kind of set the stage by by having 52:53 a selective pressure for making more of these Amino isolated rnas and then that 52:58 chemistry was co-opted uh during the evolution of the ribosome to actually make proteins 53:05 okay all right so just to uh to summarize 53:11 um I think you know we what we've actually learned about the process is is that a 53:17 lot of things that looked really hard if you overcome your preconceptions you can figure out ways that they happen easily 53:24 okay and and almost all the big advances in this field have come from overcoming 53:31 some kind of bias or preconception personally I feel that this is a great 53:39 bills to be in because there's been so many surprises and there's just been 53:44 this enormous wealth of totally surprising and unanticipated 53:49 chemical and physical phenomenon that we never would have stumbled across if we weren't trying to figure out how life 53:55 got started um and I think that we're 54:01 close to maybe having a coherent pathway that it gives us 54:07 a picture of how things could have happened step by step where none of the steps are 54:14 are just incredibly contrived for example so that's at least the goal 54:20 I think we're getting that so let me just end by I've tried to mention some of the key people my lab has had so many 54:27 brilliant graduate students and postdocs over the years uh here are the few of the ones that have contributed recently 54:34 to some of uh the advances that I I talked about so I'd like to thank all the people who have worked in my lab 54:40 contributed to this and all the people who've helped us sell all of our collaborators and and people who've 54:47 supported the work and they deserve a lot of thanks and thank you for listening 55:03 I'm happy to take questions oh please if you'd like to ask a 55:10 question which broadly encourage please please 55:22 um hi hello um I'm an astrophiologist my name is Jonathan I was um you mentioned the 55:30 isolated uh immuno amino acid RNA and how they um 55:36 and they form um what was the um origin of of that or is 55:41 that also a mystery like the uh okay how how did that amino acid end up yeah 55:46 because at the end of the RNA yeah yeah no that that's a great question 55:51 um there are some simple uh kinds of chemistry that you can 55:57 use to do that I'm not convinced yet that we have something that the 56:05 right one the one that looks prebiotically realistic there are a lot of different ways to do it it's not a 56:10 hard reaction but we're still still searching for something that looks 56:16 more likely to have happened and you also mentioned you were um in the many 56:22 ways that like broke the immortal suit Paradigm that one of them was the um 56:28 these cyanide diluting in the water with the uh hydrothermal fence mixing life 56:35 um is that like your main belief or is that like that's just one step right that's it's it's the the important thing 56:43 is is the idea that you can build up a reservoir of material and accumulate it 56:48 and then use it later on and there that happens or can happen at many steps in 56:54 all of these pathos I only gave that as one example but there are a lot of other examples thank you very much 57:03 yeah where do you imagine the chirality coming in we have the chirality amino 57:09 acids and the sugars and the lipids and so on and they all had to become chirally pure 57:15 at some point so um that could be a whole lecture uh 57:21 you know uh if you like 20 years ago it was this 57:27 huge mystery that how could you end up with 57:32 you know all the molecules of a certain type having the same handedness right and they're just you know there was this the uh so I 57:40 reaction it's an auto catalytic way of doing uh there were there's no one ever 57:45 figured out how to do that in a way that would get you the right molecules 57:50 um there were other many other ideas about how it could happen then 57:55 I forget maybe five six seven years ago uh Crucible Vietnam a Spanish geochemist 58:03 came up with a process called at the beginning called Crystal grinding later 58:08 chiral Amnesia now Vietnam ripening and the idea that if you have something 58:14 that crystallizes to make separate right and left-handed crystals and you 58:20 put energy into the system by grinding them down they get grind down to a finer powder 58:26 that dissolves recrystallizes on the bigger crystals and there's a cycle and 58:31 that leads the crystal the solid form to diverge spontaneously to the all right-handed or all left-handed simple 58:38 physical process no one believed it at the cell countering too but then it was 58:43 quickly replicated then turns out again no no we can't figure 58:50 out how to get that into the chemistry at the right stage and now there's a whole lot of exciting 58:57 work that's just coming at about how to use spin spin interactions magnetic 59:02 field um to to essentially to drive an angel 59:08 selective nucleation Of crystallization and this works beautifully on exactly 59:14 the right molecule so maybe that's the answer 59:19 yeah it's that whole Field's been transformed multiple times 59:27 just um thank you for your wonderful talk so RNA is very negatively charged yes so so has that worked to its 59:34 advantage or disadvantage it's I think it's a really 59:42 one of the most important things about a genetic material is that 59:49 it should be fairly uniform right you you want to have a be able to have an 59:54 arbitrary sequence right because you needed you need different sequences to to do different 1:00:00 things and so to copy those sequences you want to have the structure the surface and the 1:00:07 chemistry be fairly uniform independent of the sequence and so being having a a 1:00:13 highly negatively charged backbone I think helps with that right if you don't 1:00:19 have that you make molecules that that are have an uncharged background they tend to just glom up into little 1:00:25 three-dimensional you know Blobs of Goo which you can't replicate so I think 1:00:31 that poly and ionic backbone is an essential aspect of the chemistry of RNA 1:00:41 uh there's an online question would you care to comment on the concept 1:00:46 of the lipid world the idea that the earliest organized structures were lipid my cells and that the catalytic and 1:00:53 catalytic entities were different Arrangements of the hydrophilic lipid head groups 1:00:59 so so the way I think about this is the the yeah the lipids are critical they 1:01:06 could be very simple maybe just fatty acids maybe more complicated I am a little bit skeptical but I could 1:01:15 be totally wrong I bet the idea of weather interactions between the head groups contribute to specific 1:01:21 interesting catalysis I think they're more important for making the bilayer membrane structure that encloses all 1:01:30 this other stuff of the cell and and does it in a dynamic way that 1:01:35 allows for growth and division and as well as permeability to to substrate 1:01:41 some exit of waste materials so I think it's those physical properties that are 1:01:47 important but what's missing so far is a really effective 1:01:53 past life for generating things as simple as fatty acids it's one 1:01:58 of the least explored areas of Prebiotic chemistry 1:02:06 hi um in one of your slides you had a plot of 1:02:12 um the amount of bits it takes to describe a certain yeah Arrangement and the amount of effective 1:02:19 like work it can do or right right yeah um I was wondering how you were 1:02:25 um how you go about looking at a structure and giving a number for the 1:02:30 amount of bits it takes to describe it sure good good question so uh what we do 1:02:36 is we we by individual selection we'll find a structure and and then we can 1:02:42 take that structure and make a new library in which we've doped every position with all the other 1:02:49 possibilities right so if there's an a we put in mostly a but a lot of also some GC and you do that at every 1:02:56 position so now we have another huge library then we again we select out the variants that work and then we align all 1:03:04 those sequences and we can immediately see okay this position you have to be in it but this position you have to be a c 1:03:11 at this position you can be anything that these two positions you have to be able to make a Watson quick base clear 1:03:17 and so from that information we can calculate the information content required to specify that structure 1:03:29 what is the difference between RNA and DNA yeah 1:03:35 so so the difference is a small chemical difference it's just one oxygen atom at 1:03:42 a particular place on the sugar it has a very important consequences 1:03:50 [Music] and and and so DNA is very stable it 1:03:56 doesn't degrade very quickly just in water whereas rnas it tends to fall 1:04:02 apart and and you know you can ask is that a good thing or a bad thing you know why 1:04:07 didn't everything begin with DNA instead of RNA there are some Prebiotic Pathways that 1:04:14 might give us the building blocks of DNA at the beginning so this is actually something people are still debating 1:04:23 oh hello I have a question so is there any biological evidence for your proposed 1:04:31 Pathways like uh is this special uh nucleotide exists in some Asian bacteria 1:04:37 and still take part in some very large Pathways some every biological evidence like that no all of this early chemistry 1:04:44 is kind of gone I mean it's only laboratory 1:04:50 chemistry nothing like this happens in biology um despite rather intensive searches 1:04:58 people have made for the so-called Shadow biosphere you know small 1:05:04 remnants of this earlier RNA world nothing like that's been seen and I think the answer the reason for that is 1:05:11 is just that early life wasn't very efficient it wasn't very well adapted to 1:05:17 its environment like Modern Life is and and it was just all eaten up so and the 1:05:23 conditions of the chemical conditions of the modern 1:05:29 Earth are very different from the chemistry of the early Earth for example there was no oxygen no free oxygen 1:05:36 around uh on the earlier so the kinds of chemistry that could have happened would be very different 1:05:42 and and none of this could happen now we we just have to reconstruct what's 1:05:49 possible from experiments in the lab 1:05:57 so thank you for your brilliant talk uh I'm curious that when you were introducing the central dogma of life 1:06:03 which is a relationship between DNA RNA and protein so your link DNA and RNA 1:06:09 with one Arrow however you linked RNA and protein with three arrows so for that three arrows are you do you have a 1:06:15 specific meaning yes Yes actually the the meaning is that the messenger RNA 1:06:22 codes for the protein sequence the ribosomal RNA makes it 1:06:28 and the tearness bring the amino acids to the ribosome so rnas have three 1:06:34 different roles in building proteins another clue that life began with RNA 1:06:42 thank you for your talk I have a very general question about something I never fully understood over here 1:06:47 um what is the driving force for making things more and more complex over time like usually we talk about systems that 1:06:54 strive towards equilibrium they want to be as boring as possible but once we have an energy gradient of some sort 1:06:59 yeah the generator red race things want to be more complex and more efficient how does this work yeah well there are 1:07:05 many many examples in which uh far from equilibrium systems generate local order 1:07:11 right and that energy is is dissipated uh through locally ordered structures 1:07:18 and biology is just one example of that right so all of this depends on 1:07:23 different inputs of energy chemical energy in the form of reactive molecules that we're still 1:07:30 figuring out we have ideas for how to use thermal energy to drive some parts of the cycle 1:07:38 mechanical energy can drive division there are many ways 1:07:44 in which energy comes into the system so all of this is uh is a collection of far 1:07:51 from equilibrium phenomenon that they're conspired together to generate order 1:07:57 is it possible to describe it as a driving force for complexity is that some way to formalize it in some way uh 1:08:05 those are both my pay grade I mean I know that you need you need energy to drive the Assembly of these systems but 1:08:12 uh yeah Advance non-equilibrium thermodynamics is complicated 1:08:18 thank you very much I have a question yeah this is a good 1:08:23 lecture to make us rethink where we come from so my my question I'm here yeah so 1:08:29 it seems there's assumption most of the this chemistry like involving RNA 1:08:35 happens in solution so is it possible that it happens with assistance of Solid 1:08:41 Surfaces all kind of a closed compartment and hopping from surfaces yeah yeah that's a very actually very 1:08:49 interesting idea um so a long time ago um uh Jim Ferriss 1:08:55 and I think initially with Leslie orgo showed that you could assemble the the surfaces of certain 1:09:06 plays basically could Catalyst the Assembly of nucleotides into RNA strands 1:09:12 and unfortunately it hasn't really gone beyond that I mean the idea persists but 1:09:18 experiments that would show something more interesting haven't you know worked out or been done 1:09:25 I think part of the problem is if you have an RNA molecule absorbed on a surface it won't be in the right geometry that 1:09:33 you need to to copy it into a double helical product and so personally a 1:09:40 little skeptical that minerals would play a direct role in in for example 1:09:46 replication chemistry but they certainly could do all kinds of other interesting things 1:09:52 it is something we think about a lot 1:09:57 um where do amino acids come from cyanide yes 1:10:05 in the beginning and early on in the earlier history there there are very 1:10:11 well worked there very high yielding Pathways to go from cyanide to 1:10:18 not all but most of the biologically important amino acids nowadays they're 1:10:24 made in a totally different way they were made by metabolic pathways inside cells by enzymes so 1:10:32 how how that transition was made from a purely chemical approach before there 1:10:40 was life to this metabolic approach that we see now that is again one of the big mysteries 1:10:48 in this in this whole area there are very few cases where we can see how 1:10:55 something went from a Prebiotic chemical reaction to a metabolic reaction 1:11:03 I had a quick question um so when you're showing oh hi sorry um the vesicle growth um with the 1:11:10 introduction of my cells um it looked it had this uh weird elongated morphology I was wondering 1:11:16 what drove that instead of keeping like a a more uniform circular morphology 1:11:21 yeah we we've wondered about that for a long time I mean I could tell you the 1:11:27 theory that we have I have no idea if this is correct but the idea is if you start off with a vesicle that has 1:11:35 multiple layers of lipid right and then there you feed it with more lipid coming 1:11:41 in from the solution the outermost membrane layer is gonna 1:11:46 be the one that grows first okay and but there's not much volume in 1:11:53 between it and the next layer on the inside and so the result is the extra layer gets sort of 1:12:00 and then over time everything equilibrates to a multi-layered filament 1:12:06 we can sort of see that happening in some of our confocal microscopy images 1:12:12 but I still think that's an area that needs a lot more study to really understand 1:12:19 the biophysics thank you 1:12:28 so a lot of biologists I've met they have varying estimates on how long they 1:12:34 think it takes place a thousand year process et cetera so I was wondering uh your 1:12:42 post model here where RNA developed this way how long do you think 1:12:47 that takes and why yeah okay so so the question of time scales again I think 1:12:54 it's very interesting I think you have to the time scales that are relevant depend on the process you're thinking 1:13:00 about so you know we're in that image that I showed we're 1:13:06 thinking maybe on the order of 100 million years for the earth to cool down enough to have liquid water so that's 1:13:11 100 million in your times once you've got liquid water on the surface okay then maybe you need the right 1:13:19 environment in terms of hydrothermal circulation a volcanic region impact 1:13:25 craters maybe getting the right geophysical environment could have 1:13:31 happened on the scale of millions of years or tens of Millions once you've got the right geophysical 1:13:38 environment then the chemistry can start to happen and maybe it takes thousands of years to build up a reservoir of 1:13:45 cyanide in the form of parasyanide salts once that gets processed by heat 1:13:53 the derivatives that are made are much more reactive and now the chemistry is going to start happening on the time 1:13:59 scale of hours to days to weeks once you start building up nucleotides 1:14:05 that can assemble and can polymerize now you're talking about reactions that happen on time scale of minutes to hours 1:14:14 when we get to an entire protocell system that can grow and divide I think 1:14:19 the time scale will be hours to days because there's a lot of different parts to that so so I think once everything 1:14:27 was in place things started happening really quickly but it may have taken a 1:14:32 long time to get everything that's set up perfect 1:14:39 what role do you envision for the Extraterrestrial delivery of organic 1:14:44 molecules and things like carbonaceous chondrites and so on as opposed to The 1:14:49 Institute synthesis of some of these building blocks on Earth yeah yeah so so 1:14:55 there's no doubt that a lot of carbon and a huge variety of molecules were delivered to the surface of the early 1:15:02 Earth by the impacts of of you know stuff from space the comets asteroids 1:15:10 whatever the problem is that those collections of molecules are 1:15:17 mostly things we don't want very little of the right molecules at very very low 1:15:22 concentrations so I don't think they played a major role in the actual origin 1:15:28 of life I think what played was much more important for that were the the 1:15:35 in-situ the chemistry actually happening in local environments it could give you a lot of just the right things 1:15:45 thank you so much for your talk really fantastic I um on the slide where you're talking about 1:15:50 the various uh forms of energy that drive the production of cyanide I'm wondering specifically about UV 1:15:57 radiation and is there a sense of an optimal level of UV radiation to drive the production of cyanide production of 1:16:04 amino acids from there yeah I I mean it's so 1:16:11 people have worked pretty extensively on on photochemical processes that lead to 1:16:17 cyanide production it depends extremely on 1:16:23 um the chemical composition of the atmosphere and the wavelength of the light so this 1:16:31 is high high up and since there's no ozone right you have a lot of very short 1:16:37 wavelengths UV which can basically rip rip things apart into atoms that can 1:16:42 then come back together to make this triple bond species that are very high in energy 1:16:48 but whether that so that nice thing about that is it could be a it's a kind of 1:16:54 global process whereas the cyanide that's made in an impact is localized 1:17:01 so I there's still a lot of debate about what's the best way what would be the 1:17:07 most efficient way to get a lot of cyanide in the right place at the right time 1:17:21 yeah hi so um I'm wondering if after studying this 1:17:27 for all these years if you're convinced or have an idea if uh life is possible in other 1:17:34 planets whether or not you think that that's something that is out there yeah 1:17:40 um so you know I used to say we have no 1:17:46 idea that's why we're doing this we're trying to understand if it's easy or hard to get from chemistry to life 1:17:51 and having worked on this for a long time we still don't really know but there's a 1:17:59 lot of steps in the pathway that we used to think look really hard right you 1:18:06 have no idea and now it turns out they're easy so it's kind of making me think that 1:18:12 well maybe I mean there are gaps that remain to be understood but maybe the whole pathway is actually not that hard 1:18:19 and if that's really the case there are to be 1:18:24 I find a lot of exoplanets out there but then that's a little scary right 1:18:30 because nobody has contacted us it didn't either 1:18:36 getting to intelligent life is really hard which could be or maybe the most likely thing is that 1:18:44 life frequently does get to the point of intelligence and then it self-destructs 1:18:49 which we're very close to now um so we don't know we'll see 1:18:55 sorry to end on a down note 1:19:00 I have a follow-up to my last question so if uh the origin of life when 1:19:06 conditions are right is something you think happens on a very short time scale yeah why is it that we only sort of you 1:19:12 know see one lineage of life here oh okay yes that's a different question right so everything that we see now 1:19:20 traces back to a common ancestor but that common ancestor the Luca the last 1:19:25 Universal common asset was essentially like a modern bacteria it had everything 1:19:30 that Modern Biology has and so we don't see with very few exceptions 1:19:38 anything from before that point right so it looks like 1:19:45 a single unique origin but it didn't have to be that way it could have been that life was popping up all over the 1:19:50 planet and you know it pops up here gets hit by a comet you know it's killed off 1:19:56 pops up again over here um it's possible that there were many 1:20:01 independent Origins and that um you know sell Fusion events resulted in 1:20:08 the exchange of genetic information horizontal Gene transfer right primordial sex if you want to look at it 1:20:14 that way they would have speeded up evolution but all of that period of history is 1:20:20 been erased so all we can really do is speculate and think about possible 1:20:27 mechanisms I was a wondering about like the primary 1:20:33 Earth and how I'm over here and so you were saying it was all localized right based on different environments so I was 1:20:40 wondering hey is there any evidence to see that you know ancient nucleotides 1:20:45 ancient amino acids you know are they different on different parts of the earth and then second of all what was 1:20:51 kind of the driving force to have the standardized nucleotides we see today in the amino acids we see today 1:20:57 right okay so two very interesting questions so so first 1:21:02 um you know if you look for old rocks like the older the rock the the less there is 1:21:08 of it right because the Earth has plate tectonics right and so we're constantly losing 1:21:15 Continental land mass to subduction and so they're only a few couple of two or three places 1:21:21 on the Earth where you have you have uh rocks that date back to 1:21:27 3.8 or more billion years ago and those rocks by and large been fairly heavily 1:21:34 processed so there's there's no record of the 1:21:40 early organic chemistry uh of the Earth that is what is making Mars look so 1:21:47 interesting right Mars never developed like tectonics and so there's a lot of really old surface on Mars and maybe 1:21:57 or maybe not there might be some residue of early either early chemistry or early 1:22:04 life if there ever was early life on Mars it's one of the main things that's driving the exploration of Mars at this 1:22:12 point okay and then sorry the second question was 1:22:22 oh yes right yeah yeah yeah so that's also very interesting and and 1:22:28 somewhat controversial question so there are some people who think that the chemistry just 1:22:35 intrinsically goes towards the standard building blocks of RNA 1:22:41 now is that because people have spent the most effort trying to understand how to make those building 1:22:48 blocks and those neglected other possibilities to some extent Maybe 1:22:54 but we have looked at a lot of Alternatives alternative chemistries and 1:23:01 this is the subject of my talk tomorrow and basically you know this 1:23:08 the the the the summary is that RNA always wins our RNA just looks better 1:23:14 than anything else that could have been made and uh I think that's pretty remarkable 1:23:20 I we it's maybe too early to state that too strongly but it really looks like 1:23:27 the chemistry is just funneled towards making RNA 1:23:33 maybe if we ever get to exoplanets you know some other star will find worms in 1:23:39 life that have the same basic underlying chemistry you don't know 1:23:47 um so I'm also very curious about the third mystery what what is the function of first peptide the third question you 1:23:55 have what is the function of the first peptides that were made by coded synthesis so okay so I think 1:24:04 that you have to go back a step and so there are many ways of making peptides 1:24:10 right it's it's not it's not hard what's hard is to make them in a coded way so 1:24:15 the question at least the way we're thinking about it is could there have been some simple 1:24:22 peptides that were made in a non-coded one maybe just because there are some amino 1:24:29 acids around more than others they come together they make kind of random 1:24:34 sequence strands that are biased to contain certain amino acids if those do 1:24:39 something useful and if so if there's something any a 1:24:44 little bit useful there then it would be worthwhile making more of it right and then you would have a selective 1:24:49 advantage to start start to build in coding to the system now what that primordial function is we 1:24:56 don't really know we're we're thinking about um peptide aggregation phase separation 1:25:04 forming hydrogels other people are thinking about peptides that interact 1:25:09 with RNA stabilize structures there are a lot of possibilities but we 1:25:15 don't actually know what the most likely thing is I was just thinking environmentalization for example for 1:25:21 formation of crystalline like you have a IDP is interesting disorder proteins 1:25:28 which a loss or example not to crystallize so you set out crystals are 1:25:33 important you need certain coasters maybe not do you think the academy a function like you have just tiny peptide 1:25:40 just creating an environment like Mr environment just modulate Crystal 1:25:46 formation or non-crystal formation for RNA could could be could be either either of 1:25:54 those kinds of things we're also thinking about you know peptides like to interact with with membranes and maybe 1:26:00 primitive membranes had not only lipids but also pep buds 1:26:05 adhered to them inserted so yeah what we need are experiments to actually show 1:26:10 like okay this is a way that A Primitive peptide actually could be useful and 1:26:16 that's what's missing 1:26:22 additional question if not in fact thanks again absolutely 1:26:27 grateful [Music] 1:26:42 okay 1:26:47 okay maybe they can edit out the parts where it could get the movie to play 1:27:04 I've seen more information 1:27:21 snakes ASU School of Molecular Sciences 1.47K subscribers Videos 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