Boise Science on Tap brings monthly science talks to Boise Brewing, featuring expert speakers for audiences of all backgrounds.

Join us for enlightening discussions and engaging content that will spark your curiosity and broaden your knowledge.

The difference between living organisms and non-life material is that life can make copies of itself. To do this, living organisms use genetics, which guarantees that traits are passed along from parent to offspring. At the molecular level, this works by making a copy of the genetic material (DNA) and placing this copy in a new cell that becomes a new organism. The genetic material contains all the functions needed to build a new matching organism. But how did this gene-copying process start? My research develops model systems in the lab that help us understand how such a gene copying process could have started ~4 billion years ago. In this talk, I will show one example we have studied that demonstrates how multiple gene fragments can spontaneously put themselves together and become a gene - a functional genetic sequence emerges from four non-functional genetic sequences.