2025

Plausible Activation Chemistry for the Origin and Early Evolution of Life

Linked Project 1: Prebiotic Activating Agents

Investigator
PI: John Sutherland, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, University of Cambridge

Project dates
01 April 2025 - 31 March 2028    

Summary
Life on Earth is a pervasive energy-consuming process and its voracious appetite is now satiated by extraction of energy from a myriad geochemical sources ultimately driven by planetary redox chemistry and the photon flux of the sun. However, to enable this an inordinately elaborate machinery and mechanism that evolved over eons are required. During the origin and early evolution of life, something very much simpler must have been in operation. We have now got some good clues as to what this chemistry might have been and the sorts of early Earth environment that could have enabled it. In a beautiful twist, it transpires that the energy source is derived from a waste product of biological building block synthesis. We want to develop these ideas and thus learn how biology was nurtured by early environmental chemistry in specific locations until it could start to sustain itself, divide and conquer the planet.
 

Linked Project 2: Environmental pathways for activating agents

Investigator
PI: Nicholas Tosca, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge

Project dates
01 February 2025 - 31 January 2027

Summary
Because recent results from the Sutherland lab suggest that compounds derived from reduced S may have played an important role in activation chemistry (in addition to many other important prebiotic chemical processes), we will focus here on the sources, reactions, and fluxes of reduced S compounds to prebiotic aquatic systems, and pathways through which these may have synthesised activating agents. The goal is to identify regions of parameter space over which activation chemistry may have taken place, and evaluate whether these can satisfy requirements imposed by simultaneous investigations in the Sutherland lab.

Exploring Surface Hydrothermal Vents as the Cradle of Life: Bridging Model, Experiment and Environment

Linked Project 1: Surface Hydrothermal Vents in the Lab: Testing a Promising New Prebiotic Scenario 

Investigators
PI: Oliver Shorttle, Department of Earth Science & Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge
Co-I: Paul B Rimmer, Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge & Paolo Sossi, EAPS, ETH Zurich

Project dates
01 June 2025 - 31 May 2028

Summary
Laboratory chemistry exploring the origin of life has been able to produce the molecules that store life’s information and package it into compartments.  This chemistry needs to start with simple non-organic molecules, albeit the right molecules are rarely found at all in Earth’s environment today.  So how would these molecules have been available on the early Earth to start life? Based on calculations, we have proposed a scenario where the required molecules were produced by the early Earth’s uniquely hot magmas when they interact with graphite, which would have been abundant following asteroid impacts.  In this project we will test our predictions with experiments to understand (1) how hot early Earth magmas needed to be to make this scenario work,(2) how nitrogen-rich the magmas need to be, and (3) whether the feedstock molecules, once produced from the magmatic gas, dissolve in water to drive origin of life chemistry. 
 

Linked Project 2:  Surface Hydrothermal Vents in Silico: Modeling Magma-Derived Gas-Phase Chemistry in Hydrothermal Vents

Investigators
PI: Paul B Rimmer, Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge
Co-I: Oliver Shorttle, Department of Earth Science & Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge & Paolo Sossi, EAPS, ETH Zurich 

Project dates
01 October 2025 - 01 January 2029

Summary
Hydrothermal vents have appeared to be promising environments for prebiotic chemistry, though for some time severe problems have been identified for deep sea hydrothermal vents. Many of these problems can be overcome for shallow or surface hydrothermal vents. In addition, surface vents fed by high-temperature graphite-saturated magmas are predicted to be fed by a clean chemical mixture rich in hydrogen cyanide, methyl isocyanide and cyanoacetylene. These molecules are the key feedstock molecules for ultraviolet-driven prebiotic synthesis of both amino acids and nucleotides. The clean chemistry will facilitate the synthesis of these amino acids and nucleotides without many side products. The model predictions for this outcome are not empirically grounded. In this project, the successful PhD student will compare experimental results for high-temperature nitrogen-rich graphite-saturated magmas to the best current chemical kinetics model for this kind of system, and will use the experimental results to extend that model. 

Fluid dynamical constraints on the habitability of ice worlds: Rock-water interaction

Investigators
PI: Nicole Shibley, Department of Applied Mathematics & Theoretical Physics/Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge
Co-I: Oliver Shorttle, Institute of Astronomy/Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge & Duncan Hewitt, Department of Applied Mathematics & Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge

Project dates
01 October 2026 - 31 March 2030

Summary
Several habitable worlds are surmised to exist both in and beyond the Solar System. One example of such worlds in the Solar System are ice-covered satellites, such as Europa and Enceladus. These ice-covered bodies with liquid-water oceans are thought to be reasonable systems under which to look for life. In this proposal, we focus on the water-rock interactions that may occur between the moons’ liquid-water oceans and their underlying cores/mantles to explore the physical and chemical conditions under which life may be created, maintained, and transported.

Climate, Glaciation, and the Co-Evolution of Life and Its Environment

Investigators
PI: Robin Wordsworth, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences / Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, USA 
Co-I: Nicholas Tosca, Department of Earth Sciences, Cambridge, UK

Project dates
01 April 2025 - 31 March 2027

Summary
Earth has gone through many episodes of hot and cold climates in its past, including glaciations where ice extended all the way to the equator. The causes of these events and their links to the evolution of the biosphere remain poorly understood. Here we propose to use a sophisticated new coupled climate – carbon cycle model to understand the causes and consequences of key climate events in the second half of Earth’s history. From what we learn in these studies, we will then draw general conclusions about the links between climate, the carbon cycle and the biosphere, with implications for understanding climate on terrestrial-type exoplanets.