3.0

Average Course Rating

The majority of Life that existed on our planet is extinct, and the small and biased number of lineages that survived into the present cannot tell a complete story of Life’s evolutionary history. To fill these blank pages, we need to explore the fossil record on Earth (and elsewhere in the solar system) for information that can be directly integrated with data for living organisms. However, modern biology is mostly a molecular science – and we know that biomolecules experience drastic chemical alteration during fossilization. This course tackles the ‘Molecular Gap’ between past and present life forms from a practical and research-oriented perspective! We will survey the various chemical approaches that allow to extract biologically meaningful information from modern and fossil samples, and explore their individual strengths and limitations. Then we will move on to cover the nature of different biological signatures encoding diagnostic traits across the tree of Life, and explore the importance of corrections for evolutionary relationships when integrating data. Lastly, we will discuss the potential of multivariate statistics in the systematic extraction of meaningful biosignatures from notoriously noisy modern and fossil biological data. We will use prepared training data sets during guided in-session exercises, and students will go through the complete cross-disciplinary process of developing a biosignature – translational skills, that will enable them to conduct independent research on the topic. Recommended Course Background: Three Upper Level Science Courses.