Dr. Daniel Duzdevich – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Dr. Daniel Duzdevich

The University of Chicago
Molecular Biology, Origin of Life and Astrobiology

External Junior Fellow (Marie S. Curie FCFP)
September 2023 – August 2024

Last Update: 08.11.2024

Curriculum Vitae

Daniel Duzdevich uses the tools of experimental molecular biology to study the emergence of life on the early Earth. He is currently an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the The University of Chicago and a member Jack W. Szostak’s laboratory. He was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Prof. Szostak at the Harvard University Origins of Life Initiative prior to the laboratory’s recent move to Chicago. Daniel also collaborates on several astrobiology projects. His earlier research focused on single-molecule approaches to explore DNA dynamics. For his doctoral work in the laboratory of Prof. Eric C. Greene at Columbia University he studied eukaryotic DNA replication, and for his master’s project in the laboratory of Prof. Michael J. Edwardson and Dr. Robert Henderson at the University of Cambridge he studied DNA structures implicated in Huntington’s disease. He has written extensively on the molecular properties of nucleic acids, and his first book, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species: A Modern Rendition, was published in 2014.

Selected Publications

2021 Duzdevich D, Carr CE, Ding D, Zhang SJ, Walton TS, and Szostak JW. Competition between bridged dinucleotides and activated mononucleotides determines the error frequency of nonenzymatic RNA primer extension. Nucleic Acids Research. 49, 7: 3681-3691.
2015 Duzdevich D, Warner MD, Ticau S, Ivica NA, Bell SP, and Greene EC. The dynamics of eukaryotic replication initiation: origin specificity, licensing, and firing at the single-molecule level. Molecular Cell. 58: 483-494.
2014 Duzdevich D, Redding S, and Greene EC. DNA dynamics and single-molecule biology. Chemical Reviews. 114: 3072-3086.
2014 Duzdevich D. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species: A Modern Rendition with a foreword by Olivia Judson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
2011 Duzdevich D, Li J, Whang J, Takahashi H, Takeyasu K, Dryden DTF, Morton AJ, and Edwardson MJ. Unusual structures are present in DNA fragments containing super-long huntingtin CAG repeats. PLoS ONE. 6: e17119.

FRIAS Project

Midnight in the Laboratory: Adventures in the quest for life between test tubes and imagination

The origin of life on Earth is a mystery rich with meanings. There are myths and stories—and hypotheses and ideas. We may never know for certain how life started, but we have amassed just enough information about the deep past of both the solar system and biology that it has become a scientific question, accountable to experiments in the laboratory. That is a place of concrete results, but an ancient Earth summoned by experiments and merely percolating with the possibility of life is a foreign world to the scientist saddled with a body meant for narrow slices of time and space. This collection of essays will explore the contrast between lived experience in the laboratory at a human scale, and the multi-billion-year history of life and nanometer-sized molecules under study. It will invite scientists to consider how their bodies, interactions with language, and deepest instincts about experimentation are important to the rhythm of scientific work and its broader meaning beyond just formal results. What does it feel like to imagine and perform experiments about how life began, but to also embrace the limits of human perspective? What can this teach us about our place on the planet, couched in its full biological history, back to the start of life?