By Sian Wilkerson

With a new grant awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Virginia Commonwealth University researcher Julio Alvarez hopes to answer an age-old question.

By analyzing microdroplet growth and division, Alvarez, Ph.D., and his team in the Chemical Biology and Biochemistry Lab aim to identify mechanisms that could have contributed to the emergence – 4 billion years ago – of the Last Universal Common Ancestor. LUCA is a single-celled organism from which all extant cellular life is believed to have evolved, and the team has received a four-year, $554,941 grant from the foundation to pursue the research.

“LUCA represents a hypothetical single-celled ancestor of all life on Earth,” said Alvarez, an associate professor in VCU’s Department of Chemistry in the College of Humanities and Sciences. “However, it remains mysterious how lifelike behaviors came about from nonliving matter during the first 500 million years of Earth.”

In Alvarez’s lab, researchers use electrochemistry to advance understanding of biological systems at the molecular level. One of the lab’s research areas includes utilizing electrodes to analyze single microscopic entities such as microbial cells and microdroplets.

By analyzing microdroplets that self-divide and grow spontaneously when triggered by chemical reactions, the team hopes to establish principles and mechanisms by which microdroplets divide and grow, mimicking primitive cells.

“Division and growth constitute life-sustaining properties that this ancestor likely possessed,” Alvarez said.

The nonprofit Sloan Foundation distributes around 200 grants per year, totaling close to $80 million, to support research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and economics.