Lifeboat Foundation

Through Broad’s Scientists in the Classroom program, Broad researchers visit every 8th grade classroom in Cambridge each year to talk about genetics and evolution.

Every summer, 18 high school students spend six weeks at Broad working side-by-side with mentors on cutting-edge research.

In November 2022, Broad’s Genomics Platform sequenced its 500,000th whole human genome, a mere four years after sequencing its 100,000th.

Approximately 4 billion years ago, Earth was in the process of creating conditions suitable for life. Origin-of-life scientists often wonder if the type of chemistry found on the early Earth was similar to what life requires today. They know that spherical collections of fats, called protocells, were the precursor to cells during this emergence of life. But how did simple protocells first arise and diversify to eventually lead to life on Earth?

Now, Scripps Research scientists have discovered one plausible pathway for how protocells may have first formed and chemically progressed to allow for a diversity of functions.

Continue reading “New Phospholipid Discovery Rewrites the Story of the Origin of Life” »

Our understanding of RNA evolution still has a long way to go, but this experiment has made a huge leap forward.

We use two 1D quasicondensates in a double potential well to realize a bosonic Josephson junction, a microscopic system that gives rise to interesting quantum phenomena resulting from the interplay of quantum tunneling and interaction. The multimode characteristics within the quasicondensates make the system suitable as a quantum field simulator. To prepare quantum states, we split a single condensate into two and, consequently, we witness the dynamical evolution of quantum fluctuations in the relative degree of freedom between the two split condensates. We demonstrate how to use these dynamics to effectively prepare more strongly correlated quantum states and how those influence spatial phase coherence.

Our work introduces innovative methods for engineering correlations and entanglement in the external degree of freedom of interacting many-body systems. It is a leap forward in understanding and harnessing quantum correlations, paving the way for exciting possibilities in quantum simulation research.

How deep is the lunar regolith and megaregolith, the latter of which consists of the cracked lunar crust layers resulting from billions of years of impact craters? This is what the Synthetic Pulse Artemis Radar for Crustal Imaging (SPARCI, pronounced “sparky”) instrument hopes to address as the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) was recently awarded a 3-year, $2,041,000 grant from NASA’s Development and Advancement of Lunar Instrumentation (DALI) program as part of advancing lunar exploration technologies.

Image of the Synthetic Pulse Artemis Radar for Crustal Imaging (SPARCI, pronounced “sparky”). (Credit: Southwest Research Institute/Bryan Pyke)

“Learning more about the lunar megaregolith will help us gain a wider understanding of the Moon’s formation and that of similar bodies with thin, sparse atmospheres,” said Dr. David Stillman, who is a geophysicist at SwRI and SPARCI’s principal investigator. “If we are able to pinpoint exactly where this layer begins, we can use that to create more accurate formation and evolution models.”

Researchers from China and Japan have discovered distinct characteristics of Earth’s lower mantle flow field. They investigated seismic anisotropy in the upper part of the lower mantle beneath the Philippine Sea Plate (PSP) and found that the ancient lower mantle flow field is still preserved there.

The study is published in Nature Geoscience.

The lower mantle is an important layer of the Earth and may play an important role in the evolution and material cycling of Earth’s interior. It is generally believed to be not only the final destination of subducted slabs, but also the birthplace of mantle plumes, which are two major styles in the evolution and material cycling of the Earth’s surface and interior. However, our knowledge of the characteristics of the flow field and geodynamics of the lower mantle is still deficient.

How fast did the first galaxies and stars form after the Big Bang? This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to address as an international team of scientists led by the University of Melbourne used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe the merger of two galaxies that occurred approximately 510 million years after the Big Bang, or approximately 13 billion years ago. This study holds the potential to help astronomers better understand the processes behind galaxy formation and evolution during the universe’s youth.

“It is amazing to see the power of JWST to provide a detailed view of galaxies at the edge of the observable Universe and therefore back in time” said Dr. Michele Trenti, who is a Professor and Cosmologist in the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne and a co-author on the study. “This space observatory is transforming our understanding of early galaxy formation.”

For the study, the researchers used JWST’s powerful infrared instruments to observe what they hypothesize to be two merging galaxies comprised of a primary clump and a long tail with a mass equivalent to approximately 1.6 × 109 masses of our Sun that contains approximately 10 percent of the metals of our Sun and growing by approximately 19 solar masses per year. Additionally, they estimate the stars within these merging galaxies are less than 10 million years old within the main clump of the merger and stars in the outer regions to be approximately 120 million years old.

For the survival of life on Earth, the process where plants perform photosynthesis to generate oxygen and chemical energy using sunlight is crucial. Scientists from Göttingen and Hannover have now achieved a breakthrough by creating a high-resolution 3D visualization of the chloroplasts’ copying mechanism, the RNA polymerase PEP, for the first time. This intricate structure offers fresh perspectives on the operation and evolutionary history of this vital cellular apparatus, instrumental in interpreting the genetic blueprints for proteins involved in photosynthesis.

Without photosynthesis, there would be no air to breathe – it is the basis of all life on Earth. This complex process allows plants to convert carbon dioxide and water into chemical energy and oxygen using light energy from the sun. The conversion takes place in the chloroplasts, the heart of photosynthesis. Chloroplasts developed in the course of evolution when the ancestors of today’s plant cells absorbed a photosynthetic cyanobacterium. Over time, the bacterium became increasingly dependent on its “host cell”, but maintained some significant functions such as photosynthesis and parts of the bacterial genome. The chloroplast therefore still has its own DNA, which contains the blueprints for crucial proteins of the “photosynthesis machinery”

Researchers have discovered a mechanism steering the evolution of multicellular life. They identify how altered protein folding drives multicellular evolution.

In a new study led by researchers from the University of Helsinki and the Georgia Institute of Technology, scientists turned to a tool called experimental evolution. In the ongoing Multicellularity Long Term Evolution Experiment (MuLTEE), laboratory yeast are evolving novel multicellular functions, enabling researchers to investigate how they arise.

The study, published in Science Advances, puts the spotlight on the regulation of proteins in understanding evolution.