Lee Cronin: evaluation

Transcript context

…Mm-hmm. And so, in E. coli, you don’t just see, it’s not the most sophisticated cells on earth make the most sophisticated molecules. It is the coexistence of lots of complex molecules above a threshold. And so, what we realized is you could fingerprint different life forms. So fungi make really complicated molecules. Why? Because they can’t move. They have to make everything onsite. Whereas, some animals are lazy, they can just go eat the fungi, and they don’t need to make very much. And so, what you do is you look at the, so you take, I don’t know, the fingerprint, maybe the top number of high molecular weight molecules you find in the sample, you fragment them to get their assembly indices, and then what you can do is you can infer common origins of molecules. You can do a molecular… When the reverse engineering of the assembly space, you can infer common roots and look at what’s called the joint assembly space. But let’s translate that into the experiment. Take a sample, bung it in the mass spec, take the top, say, 10 molecules, fragment them, and that gives you one fingerprint. Then you do it for another sample, you get another fingerprint. Now the question is you say, “Hey, are these samples the same or different?” And that’s what we’ve been able to do and by basically looking at the assembly space that these molecules create. Without any knowledge of assembly theory, you are unable to do it. With a knowledge of assembly theory, you can reconstruct the tree. How does knowing if they’re the same or different give you the tree?…

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