Nick is a British biochemist and writer. He was awarded the first Provost's Venture Research Prize in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London, where he is now a Reader in Evolutionary Biochemistry. Nick's research deals with evolutionary biochemistry and bioenergetics, focusing on the origin of life and the evolution of complex cells. He was a founding member of the UCL Consortium for Mitochondrial Research, and is leading the UCL Research Frontiers Origins of Life programme. He is the author of three acclaimed books on evolutionary biochemistry, which have sold more than 100,000 copies worldwide, and have been translated into 20 languages.

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I am a bioengineer, computational biologist and Research Fellow in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London. I graduated as MSc from the first class of Bioengineers in the University of Porto (Portugal) and did research in leading scientific laboratories in Portugal, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Szeged, Hungary) and the Argonne National Laboratory (Chicago, USA). I earned my PhD in Chemical and Biological Engineering from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (Germany) and the University of Minho (Portugal). After my PhD I worked for a short period as a volunteer English tutor with Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala (India), and then joined the Department of Molecular Evolution in the Heinrich-Heine University of Dusseldorf as a postdoctoral fellow.

My research explores one of life’s deepest and oldest questions: how on Earth did cells first emerge? I am profoundly interested in the origin of self-referentiality and in scrutinizing the tangled concepts of last universal common ancestor, minimal cells, protocells and chassis cells (Xavier et al. MMBR 2014). My work has involved the comparative simulation of multiple large computational models of metabolic networks of prokaryotes, the simplest life-forms known, to identify essential and ancient metabolites, reactions and pathways (Xavier et al. Met Eng 2017; Xavier et al. PLoS Comp Bio 2018). I have also worked with phylogenomics to reconstruct deep evolutionary events including the last bacterial common ancestor (Xavier et al. Comms Bio 2021). I recently identified and investigated autocatalytic networks running solely on organic cofactors and metals as catalysts (Xavier et al. Proc Roy Soc B 2020), and am currently developing that framework in the study of the emergence of metabolism.

I undertook both my undergraduate and masters degrees at the university of cambridge in natural sciences, specialising in biochemistry. During my time there I undertook a summer project and helped to elucidate an abiotic version of the Krebs cycle with the Ralser group. This work contributes to growing evidence that modern metabolic pathways may have had a non-enzymatic equivalent active at the origins of life. My PhD project with Nick is focused on the prebiotic synthesis of nucleotide monomers; the building blocks of RNA and DNA which have critical roles in the origins of life being the start of the genetic code and are essential cofactors many other processes in biology. Whilst these molecules have been made before, the processes employed often utilise conditions or reactants which make little sense from geological and/or biological standpoints. Given this and my previous work showing non-enzymatic metabolisms are feasible, my thesis questions simply asks, would nucleotide synthesis be any different? Preliminary work so far has suggested particular steps in pyrimidine synthesis may be feasible although much more work is required and could be carried into my post-doc ambitions.

Originally from Rome, I moved to the UK in 2012 to pursue a BSc degree in Biochemistry at the University of Kent in Canterbury, getting the chance to also spend a year in Hong Kong as part of my studies, and later an MRes degree in Biosciences from UCL (with Distinction). Besides learning languages and travelling, I love music, having grown up singing and performing. During summer 2015 I had the opportunity to work at the Centre of Astrobiology (CAB) in Madrid (Spain), in the lab of Molecular Ecology, where I tested the sensitivity of an instrument for life detection on Mars by searching for biomarkers in samples from important Mars analogues on Earth such as the Atacama Desert in Chile. My current project focuses on investigating a possible primordial emergence of ATP, the “universal energy currency” of the cell, via the small prebiotically plausible molecule acetyl phosphate, in the setting of alkaline hydrothermal vents. Specifically, I am testing how ATP synthesis can be enhanced through catalysis by several geochemically plausible factors. As my interest in the origins of life stems from a passion for Astrobiology, my aim is to further extend my research and apply it to the investigation of life in the universe.

I’m from Beirut, Lebanon. I first met Nick during my Genetics MSci at University College London where he taught a course called “energy and evolution”. His lectures fuelled my interest in the biological principles underlying life on earth, such as harnessing disequilibria to power work. Though I had enjoyed various undergraduate projects related to ageing and genomics, I pursued a masters project with the Lane group to develop my technical ability and knowledge of bioenergetics pertaining to the origin of life. For the past year, my project has explored the stability of mixed amphiphile vesicles in alkaline hydrothermal vents. Using mixtures of prebiotically plausible hydrocarbons, I’ve been able to show that alkaline hydrothermal vent conditions favour the self-assembly of promising protocellular structures called vesicles. This novel work challenges the criticisms of marine conditions outlined in existing literature and lends support to Nick’s model. Above all, it is the simplicity and elegance of the possible answers provided by hydrothermal vents which I find compelling and motivates me to push the field in this direction. Now that I am part of the London interdisciplinary doctoral training programme, I intend to return to the Lane lab to pursue practical investigations into how such protocells may have non-enzymatically tapped a proton gradient. I’m keen to use computational techniques to push the group’s work further and focus my questions into testable hypotheses that begin to fill in the gaps of the steps from organic molecules in a vent to a metabolically active protocell.

I grew up in Brazil and I read Biological Sciences at UCL as an undergraduate. Since then, regardless of the area of biology, my interest has been in why and how things evolve. I have just finished my MRes in Modelling Biological Complexity, again at UCL, during which I was supervised by Nick Lane for a rotation project and my final project. During these projects, we developed upon a previous model of a pre-genetic protocell with a rudimentary type of membrane heredity by introducing thermodynamically stable branch-points of carbon metabolism forming sugars, fatty acids, amino acids and ultimately catalytic nucleotides. This is especially exciting because it creates a framework for the prebiotic formation of nucleotides that is based on what life does today, while most attempts of pre-biotic nucleotide synthesis, very counter intuitively, do not take life as a guide. Going ahead, I plan to start a PhD on modelling key evolutionary events such as the origin of life and the origin of complex life in October 2019.

I moved to London from Cambridge to study Natural Sciences at UCL, specialising in cell and molecular biology and astrophysics. I tailored my undergraduate studies to pursue my interests in astrobiology, culminating in a focus on the origin of life. As a PhD student with the London NERC Doctoral Training Partnership, I'm studying the origin of the genetic code. The emergence and development of life's genetic informational system is a fundamental scientific challenge, and may have important implications for understanding self-improving systems at other levels of biology and even in artificial intelligence. My research utilizes a blend of wet lab and computational techniques and is specifically investigating the origin of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases, a key molecular component in translation. Previous projects I have worked on include the formation and behavior of iron-sulfur clusters in prebiotic conditions and modelling pH gradients in protocells. I look forward to continuing to work on understanding the fundamental properties of life, and to applying this research in other fields like clean energy, synthetic biology, and AI.