The origin of life - can life emerge from minerals?

In the beginning, there were lots of rocks on Earth. The first life appeared 3.5 to 4 billion years ago. How could life emerge from a lifeless environment? And what is life? There are no fossils from that time. But there is LUCA. Can microbes tell us about the beginning of life? To find answers to these questions, Dr Martina Preiner and her team are reconstructing a prebiotic environment to experimentally understand some of the pathways of early life.

Dr Martina Preiner studied chemistry at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich from 2004 to 2009, after which she worked for seven years as a freelance journalist (including for Deutschlandfunk, Spektrum der Wissenschaft, Quarks&Co.). After writing a journalistic article about the origin of life, she was so fascinated by the topic that she decided to do a doctorate on it. Today, Martina Preiner is a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute in Marburg and the Microcosm Earth Centre (MEC).