Séminaire IPAG

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The dawn of organic chemistry

jeudi 21 septembre 2023 - 11h00

Cecilia Ceccarelli - IPAG
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From a “simple” chemical point of view, all terrestrial living organisms, from microbes to humans, are made up of the same basic components, such as amino acids, fatty acids, sugars and nucleobases, namely “small” molecules containing less than 100 atoms of carbon, with hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and other elements in smaller quantities: terrestrial life is based on organic chemistry. Of course, this is not by chance, because of the electronic structure of carbon and its abundance in the solar neighbourhood at the Solar System birth. Indeed, the largest molecules detected in the interstellar medium and, particularly important, in regions where future Solar-like planetary systems are born, all contain carbon atoms. Astronomers call these molecules iCOMs, for interstellar Complex Organic Molecules: they constitute about 40% of the almost 300 detected interstellar molecules. In 2017, we started the ERC funded project "Dawn of Organic Chemistry" (DOC), whose objective is to understand the organic chemistry in systems similar to the progenitor of the Solar System, with the ultimate goal to understand how organic chemistry builds up and evolves in these systems, i.e. how universal the chemical seeds of life, as the Nobel laureate C. De Duve put it, are. To reach its goal, DOC is an intrinsically interdisciplinary project where astronomers, chemists and modellers work hand to hand. In this presentation, I will report the major results of DOC and the emerging new picture of the early organic chemistry that may have experienced also our Solar System.

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Salle Manuel Forestini, 414 rue de la piscine, 38400 Saint Martin d'Hères