Event


EES Seminar Series - Dr. Jennifer Glass

"Ironing out Life’s First Breaths"

Sep 23, 2022 at - | Hayden Hall 358

Geoscience Colloquium
J. Glass

 

The Department of Earth & Environmental Science

University of Pennsylvania

Invites you to attend a EES Seminar Series

Friday, September 23rd - 3:00 PM

 

 

Dr. Jennifer Glass

Associate Professor

Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

Georgia Institute of Technology

 

"Ironing out Life’s First Breaths"

 

Every cell contains a biochemical record of four billion years of Earth-life coevolution. Our mitochondria were once free-living bacteria. Each unit of the electron transport chain that we use to breathe oxygen was borrowed from older microbial machinery. Aerobic respiration is a medley of pieces of older anaerobic respiratory pathways such as methanogenesis, anoxygenic photosynthesis, and iron oxidation. Yet we have barely begun to chart the vast landscape of myriad microbial metabolisms. In this talk, I will describe how dissecting the molecular machines of modern microbes can give us glimpses of the early Earth environments that supported life’s first breaths.