welcome to the science for the public lecture series science for the public is an organization committed to bringing science information and issues to the general public this is our website how they adapted over millions of years our guest is a joke touch our research fellow an astrobiologist at harvard university in the department of organismic and evolutionary biology is also global science coordinator of the earth life science institute at the tokyo institute of technology and co founder of sega net dot org an online astrobiology grassroots where she combined experimental paleo genetics with laboratory evolution more about that late tonight dr catch hour has received considerable recognition for her innovative approach to this work and tonight she explains how she revived a particular ancient protein then got it to evolve inside a living microbe this was thought to be nearly impossible so we'll likely hear a great deal about her work in the future as this methodology develops tonight will learn from dr katz char why scientists are trying to reconstruct ancient genes and what that work will reveal about evolutionary process sees and possibly what it adds to as biology we're very pleased to welcome thanks for having me you're very welcome and i'd like to start by finding out what this field is first off if because apparently it's very new could you give us a little background on just the field itself thanks for having me i will be talking about two seemingly distinct fields as my research combines these two aspects one is experimentally  and other field that my research benefits from is the paleo genetics field namely incest are all sequence reconstruction very access ancient sequences of contemporary genes and proteins through inferences of phylogenetic trees right now i understand this is very new how new roughly this paleo genetics well is and many aspects in science as many fee they published this paper that suggested perhaps we can take what is currently existing and then use that as a tool to reconstruct our way back in the past and access to insurance sequences and keep in mind that this time they propose as an idea and the paper beautifully outlines the figures and here's how one could do it and they'd perhaps for sol that maybe twenty years later we will have the approach of synthetic biology very can actually turn their idea into reality right and in the late eighty's early ninety's researchers including steve benner took this idea he would would  development especially the last five six years i would say has been like you know there's been a great deal of interest and field in the field and more papers coming out so you are one of the pioneers  what you're getting into what you're going to be describing for us tonight which has gotten quite a bit of attention and i'm sure we're going to hear much more even later so the field is fairly new and what's interesting just listening to you is that it's get started with physics and chemistry not biology and all of these things are merging but it's interesting how much comes from  and chemistry is there any way he said for that i would say that maybe maybe it's also one way to think about it would be to think that it's maybe not narrowed down to the discipline but perhaps the vision of yeah yeah really didn't see science perhaps in a box yes six or they were already outside the box yeah exactly so it's i think it takes outliers really yeah that will come up with these revolutionary ideas and other outlier to see what d really the the scientist who really i think made it made it all possible for us right now one of them richard lansky the i i'm lucky to have conversations with him every now and then and he always says that  teams and their young scientists can actually turn that into maybe something really happened yes and maybe it could be because maybe back then there were less boundaries or people maybe didn't think yes i guess taking chances where in fact on their nature of science is to take a chance and that you need to be able to fail to say well ok that didn't work out and start over again so it's curious that we're having this moment i hope we get over it and you know it in your time i would like to go to your work now which has been so exciting can you give us an idea first of all you're going to reconstruct older essential genes are several times shown to evolve slowly for the obvious reason that if there are limitations there the consequences could be tremendous for the cell and we need to keep this actual components then are those machinery of to sell rivals on is one of the information processing centers so you can treat d n a as information and then rivals on constantly reads through this information and tries to make sense of it and then produces proteins it's a protein doesn't make sense usually the next step so you select this particular one that is conserved across organisms more organisms you pluck that little guy out and then you do what well construction ok that was already available to me ok all right so take that and then it starts to get very interesting and i understand it again next week  happen yes and this is the fun part yeah fun for us i guess we get closer but not so much fun for bacteria and yes bacteria suffer right we're used to taking a gene of one thing and to complement those studies i did say ok well we can go and kind of travel in the current existing time yes but how about we go back in time and go to the ancestor and maybe because in the rivals a missionary this ancient protein didn't do well anymore and the whole self grew slower before so it it had difficulty replicating or it didn't replicate or did replicate but it was weaker it didn't grow which was good news for me because i didn't grow then i cannot book but the idea was that it will be not perfect but it will be viable enough it will be efficient enough to produce a viable bacteria ok which is what happens so bacteria unlike us generates a new offspring every twenty twenty five minutes in the environments that i selects in the conditions that i provide an yes right but it did in the end so we have multiple generations every fifty minutes we get a new generation of these bacteria right with this what appeared to be a we think we narrowed it down to one single component which was the gene itself right right so we went right into the information center of the system and then we replaced a very essential component we did is divergent counterpart not so shockingly the system didn't produce healthy offsprings that it is as it has more so that the whole the whole the cell itself had to make a major adjustment on the basis of having one  one way or you could think that or maybe it will be subtle steps towards i'm civility you can you can think of you know think of this in two ways my instinct was also that the response to the such a dramatic change yeah a very drastic  system will want to stand up very quickly yeah because you cannot live like this right and so experiment a little lucian at that time provided a very nice tool which is you know subject  organism to a laboratory able to show yeah and then monitor the changes in the gene and the rest of the genome see what happens in the cell because you can think of three thousand and nine hundred ninety nine different genes that could respond to the the repeatability of evolution and this is a very interesting question to me why are things the way they are was there a molecular reason behind this could evolution repeat itself and if so i was really interested in testing the dynamics between chance and necessity now that we know that likely so the idea that was also proposed and touched by can show it to you ok and so the idea was that what if we erased everything that was recorded on the state and then replayed the state again yeah would we listen to the same that everything that we see around us and everything that exists now has evolved their own particularly dialect so the finding the tape would be almost raising all the dialects and then expecting the same language the  communicating their networks that are members in this network that's optimized to the current condition but i am taking something that existed seven hundred million years ago so it's an entry in biology and this component is an essential component yes and from the analysis we do this component interacts with a lot of different things and usually essential components are there older slowly and they have more interaction partners compared to the younger modern components will listen the same story again and again or be like here a completely different and i think this is like the first time that's really been done and what was the outcome so the mutations and resemble a modern component or the ancient component will accumulate a different set of mutations and we'll be a completely different pretty not i guess completely different but different than what i currently see right and in which outcomes i thought ok these would still be restricted because the system is really focusing on the major problem which is the component alternatively which i hypothesize that this would be more chance outcome that the changes that will accumulate in the system will not be fixated on the ancient components but it will be elsewhere in the genome i see and it will be my job to figure out which was a clever way of you know fixing this problem and and looking at the literature there are so many examples that show that mutations that regulates protein or  because it is that because you're dealing with very complex systems which i thought was one of the things that you sort of underscore this is really complex so you get this part isn't known yet it's still new may i ask about that astrobiology to you're looking for a life everybody's looking for much else and so in do you expect similar mechanisms life is life is life or you have no clue or one over arching question that my research had was to understand the degree of repeated with your life in of finding life elsewhere in the universe that resembles life we have on our planet so those are the questions that really motivated me to get into the field of astrobiology and also the reason i believe generously funded my research interdisciplinary but trans disappearing that we wanted to really just create these bridges underneath and connect with each other we don't want just to communicate but to really create these bridges i think there's a big difference so so it is exciting that nowadays you can discuss the same question with a physicist we did geologists so true and we're all getting together understanding that don't be the same question that unifies us so that's very think we think maybe one reason that these pioneers came up with these brilliant ideas was because they didn't see any walls there were no borders on their thinking guy and now maybe what will also be good maybe the think that having a broad range of interest is not good yeah because a successful scientist needs to be focused exactly i agree focus is important but maybe we need to redefine what we mean by that right and  wrong as we can focus of our broad interests i don't see why that thing or the other is that there's a recognition of complexity exactly interesting that this this shift is going on like we said here you know  challenge in dealing with the past anyway right so history is written once it is written over and over again the geological record is scattered and unlike genome information that is proteins who will change the behavior of the whole cell once we integrate them into the genome may provide us some insights and maybe help us to fill the gap or maybe even attempt foundation very generously is funding my current activities here at harvard well congratulations thank you to hear that somebody is well funded because so many people are really struggling you know at this time but in any case  the implications of the research i mean they're really why because you can open up the past in a more reliable way i guess we construct and then there's the astro biological thing are there any other like implications that should we should know about well there's always the underlying force that drives my research which is understanding  system might change according to its environment is that possible so that's why i like i think setting up systems like experimental evolution very we can evolve these populations in replication  you doing this in a lab yes you're you've also there sometimes jokes about eco why in the lab it's not the coal i authored the wild is is there any risk when you're doing this in the lab that probably not but hey it is far from what we want to achieve right we're not achieving our primary goal is not necessary to replicate what was going on in nature we want to understand predefined thinking as we want to understand how before you had computers to do this sort of thing so the technology to allow us exactly in my background is in chemistry so i stumbled into this field because i love fell in love with the pollution yeah but the here one of the reasons that why i am here is also that i can collaborate with its researchers that develop these methods so i really looking forward to that and i like that like that and now i would like to before we close off here i would like to find out like is not happening and so i developed an interest in evolution through those books i wanted to understand what can be so dangerous about an idea that created this kind of backlash and i joined the team offline form into c d s and distributed throughout the nation through that i learned about evolution really by translating i learned about evolution and i learned about experiment and that was that we were sold i was a soul and i then i started seeing more connections i actually found more meaning in what i do as a chemist i was studying proteins in east but there was a big gap really like i was familiar with incest will see consequence drugs exciting studies work this was two thousand and ten really exciting stuff was coming out back then and i joined a lab that primarily does ancestral sequence reconstruction and i  these ancient sequences into evolving systems and so that's that's how it happened so it's really from and right you know religion is not truth ok there's a very encouraging story for other people for young people coming up as well from all over the world now and you know you're familiar with this problem in the united states i only saw you say yes isn't it and so that there is hope in that you tell us about that please because that is really forward looking exactly so apart from my research in the lab i do outreach activities sake and that is one of the example and i will be to go towards this question without the restriction of media very in about grant right and finding right resources so they they did a tremendous job i would say it's been three years now maybe of the idea is to really create bridges between different fields different scientists so my job is to keep an eye on the ongoing research and find exciting areas and talk to young scientists  and and developers between different in different fields towards origins that's great i'm glad the japanese are doing this somebody needs to be doing because it is all of these different and people who aren't afraid to kind of get into things but also it must be very stimulating to talk to people across it is saving lives and encouraging it so it's kind of i grew up with  books of carl sagan and i am an astrobiologist because of him yes particularly the contact because it seems like such an exciting time to be doing this and i understand we have to close off here but you do this outreach with the sagan net also i will put this up on the video so that people can go and check that out i think we have it on your event page as well but there may be some people out there that like to talk to you a little bit before we leave and i thank you so much for