We bring together astrobiologists who seek the story of life’s earliest innovations, and how their consequences might be detected from afar.
LIFE provides a conceptual framework in which researchers can address questions about the complex, bi-directional cause-and-effect relationships of life with dramatic changes in a planet’s climate, oceans, its solid surface, and its emerging continents. Ultimately, we seek to foster a “science of living worlds” that integrates views the evolution of life and its planetary context through a single holistic lens.
In parallel, LIFE researchers seek to understand how these major biological innovations and transitions affected the planet, shaping the evolutionary path of the integrated life-planet system.
1. Origins of life to Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA)
What environmental pressures and evolutionary opportunities gave rise to LUCA?
2. LUCA to a planetary biosphere
What environmental pressures and evolutionary opportunities caused life to expand to planetary scale?
3. LUCA to Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor (LECA):
What environmental pressures and evolutionary opportunities brought about compartmentalization of function within cells?
4. Single cells to differentiated multicellularity
What environmental pressures and evolutionary opportunities gave rise to cellular differentiation, connectivity, and cooperation?
