PROTOS (ERC Synergy Grant)

To in­vest­ig­ate how life emerged from noth­ing, i.e., how the trans­form­a­tion from a min­eral world to life oc­curred, the PRO­TOS pro­ject is look­ing at the geo­chem­ical pro­cesses that took place dur­ing the first bil­lion years of this plan­et's his­tory. Re­search­ers are com­bin­ing biogeo­chem­ical, physi­co­chem­ical, and ma­ter­i­als sci­ence re­search to an­swer some of sci­ence's most im­port­ant and un­answered ques­tions: Is it even pos­sible for life to arise in a world of wa­ter and min­er­als? How can the old­est re­mains of life be un­equi­voc­ally con­firmed, and how can life on other plan­ets be iden­ti­fied?

Ex­per­i­ments will show how flu­ids in­ter­act with rocks, what role min­er­als play, es­pe­cially silica, in trig­ger­ing pre­b­i­otic re­ac­tions in the prim­or­dial ocean and in the self-or­gan­iz­a­tion of min­eral-or­ganic struc­tures – which may have led to the first liv­ing cells.