Guest Lecture: Vladimir Kubyshkin

Best of all possible worlds or casual artwork: can we offer a chemical alternative to the makeup of life?

Vladimir Kubyshkin is chemist and post-doctoral fellow at the Technische Universität Berlin - Germany, invited by the research center LCB

Defining life makes a big challenge for a human mind, and this task requires understanding of the main principles, as well as the mechanisms behind life as a process. Modern molecular biology considers life from the perspective of the flow of information. Though, implementation of this information requires chemical mechanisms. For the past few decades we have witnessed, how increasing capacity and reliability of the information storage (e.g. from floppy discs to flash drives) changed the quality of the stored information. It thus may be thought that similar principle should be applied for the life processes, where multiple chemical recognition events allow for construction of proteins with defined functions, but chemical innovations via mutations are also not excluded. Is it also possible for a human-made chemical engineering science to provide nature with unique innovations at the protein level? In this context I will try to summarize some recent efforts in this direction. 

These conferences target a broad public of researchers that goes beyond the necessarily limited scope of disciplinary seminars. Hosting renowned guest international researchers favors generalist cross-disciplinary discussions between colleagues who work in different laboratories but share converging scientific interests.
 

Date: Thursday, February 8, 2018 from 12:30 to 13:45