Living Chemistry

Dr. Nayan Chakraborty - National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) – TIFR, Bangalore

Nayan is a postdoctoral fellow at NCBS-TIFR Bangalore who studies how life might have begun on Earth, moonlights as a chemistry consultant for global access-to-medicine campaigns, and happily wanders across disciplines chasing intriguing patterns.

About the talk: The Soup That Woke Up

I explore the “cooking rules” that can turn a primordial soup of simple chemicals into life-like things. I’ll present a “recipe” where a watery mix spontaneously cooks itself into cell-like systems. These blobs keep running chemical “metabolism,” grow like dough rising, and even form smaller, growing droplets inside — like starter cultures. I’ll show how light, heat, and mixing, etc. shape these recipes, and why life-like systems may be easier to “bake” than we previously assumed.