In 1872, Charles Darwin suggested that life may have originated in a
"warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts,
lights, heat, electricity etc present, so that a protein compound was
chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes". Others
subsequently expanded these ideas into what is known as the 'primordial
soup theory'. Today scientists have exquisite power to characterise the
mixtures of small molecules (i.e. 'metabolome') in such biological
soups using technological advances from the fields of
metabolomics and proteomics, amongst others. Professor David Penny, a
world-leading theorist who has contributed widely to evolutionary
biology, will describe how Darwin's ideas about the origin of life have
since evolved, then predict how current understanding of this
fundamental question may be advanced by new biomolecular technologies.