Chateando con la Ciencia: Juli Peretó Magraner
Chateando con la Ciencia: “A creative planet: How did life on Earth come to be? – Thursday 16 February
On Thursday 16th February at 19:00h a new session of the VII edition of the Cycle of colloquia “Chateando con la Ciencia” will take place, organised by the Real Zaragoza Club de Tenis with the collaboration of the Instituto de Nanociencia y Materiales de Aragón, INMA (CSIC-University of Zaragoza) with the conference by Juli Peretó Magraner, Professor of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of the University of Valencia.
Abstract: How did the chemistry of our primitive planet organise itself to give rise, 4,000 million years ago, to systems capable of obtaining matter and energy from the environment and self-replicating? How did the first simple biological systems appear? What allowed them to evolve to generate so much biodiversity?
These are very difficult questions to answer because there are hardly any traces left from such remote times. To talk to us about all this, we will have Professor Juli Peretó with us, who will explain fascinating experiments aimed at understanding how chemistry was able to come to life.
Juli Peretó is a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (University of Valencia) and a full member of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans. He was co-director-founder of the Institute for Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio, a joint University of Valencia-CSIC centre) of which he is a member of the Biotechnology and Synthetic Biology group. His research interests include the evolution of metabolism, the concept of the minimal cell, the bioprospecting of inhospitable habitats and the history of ideas about the natural origin and artificial synthesis of life. He tries to teach metabolism with an evolutionary flair to biologists, biochemists and biotechnologists. He was Secretary and Vice-President of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL), of which he was elected Fellow in 2014. He is co-founder of the company Darwin Bioprospecting Excellence SL, a spin-off of the University of Valencia installed in its Science Park. His most recent books are “Synthetic Biology: from iGEM to the artificial cell” (Springer, 2014), with M. Porcar, an abridged version of Darwin’s “The Origin of Species”, co-edited with A. Moya (PUV, 2017), “La ciència a taula”, a collection of articles on scientific gastronomy by F. Sapiña (Monografies Mètode, 2019) and “Un planeta creatiu: com va començar la vida a la Terra i com la fabricarem al laboratori” (Institució Alfons el Magnànim, 2022).
To access the talk, an access code must be requested at the following e-mail address: palacio@unizar.es.
