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Betül Kaçar

👤 Person
1202 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

Oh, absolutely.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

We tried to replicate...

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

in the most simplest way, what nature has come up with.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

Right?

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

We do this by taking nitrogen, using a lot of pressure and then generating ammonia.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

Life does this in a more sophisticated way, relying on one single enzyme called nitrogenase.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

It's the nitrogen that is used together with eight electron donor and ATP together with a lot of hydrogen.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

Life pushes this metabolism down to create fixed nitrogen.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

It's quite remarkable.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

So some biological engineers engineered E. coli to fix nitrogen, I believe, not us.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

We use nature's nitrogen fixing bug and engineer it with the nitrogen fixing metabolism that we resurrected using our computational and phylogenetic tools.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

Depends on how we define complication.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

So I will start with one of the most fascinating machineries that we target, which is the translation machinery.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

It is a very unique subsystem of cellular life in comparison to, I would say, metabolism.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

And we used to, you know, when we are thinking about cellular life, we think of cell as the basic unit or the building block.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

But from a key perspective, that's not the case.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

One may argue that everything that happens inside the cell serves the translation and the translation machinery well.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

There is a nice paper that called this that the entire cell is hopelessly addicted to this main informatic computing biological chemical system that is operating at the heart of the cell.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

It is the translation.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#350 – Betül Kaçar: Origin of Life, Ancient DNA, Panspermia, and Aliens

converts a linear sequence of mRNA into a later folded protein.