Life RCN unveiled today at AbSciCon 2022
Petri dishes containing cultures of ancient DNA molecules are pictured in the research lab of Betül Kaçar, assistant professor of bacteriology, in the Microbial Sciences Building at the University of Wisconsin–Madison on Oct. 21, 2021. Credits: Jeff Miller
NASA's Astrobiology program announced its newest Research Coordination Network (RCN) ‘LIFE: Early Cells to Multicellularity,’ bringing together a collaboration of researchers from around the world that will spend the next five years investigating the earliest biological processes and the evolution of life into more complex organisms.
The new RCN was officially launched today at the 2022 Astrobiology Science Conference, hosted by the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. The field of astrobiology seeks to understand how life originated and evolved on Earth so we can search for life elsewhere in the universe.
NASA’s RCNs are virtual collaboration structures designed to support groups of investigators to communicate and coordinate their research across disciplinary, organizational, divisional, and geographic boundaries.
“LIFE will discern rules of co-evolution that will enable us to predict how life could evolve on worlds other than our own, and how we might search for it.”
The LIFE RCN is co-led by the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Betül Kaçar, alongside Georgia Institute of Technology’s Frank Rosenzweig, Arizona State University’s Ariel Anbar, and University of California Riverside’s Mary Droser.