NASA has awarded Georgia Tech $7.2 million to establish an Astrobiology Institute to study the early evolution of life on Earth. The School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the School of Biology will join together in a multidisciplinary approach to characterize the ribosomal machinery responsible for protein synthesis. The machinery of peptide synthesis will be studied to determine the chemistry of transition from the RNA world to the protein world. The Institute is headed by biochemist Loren Williams and includes as co-PIs biologists Steve Harvey, Roger Wartell, Eric Gaucher and Terry Snell. The Institute will attempt to rewind the tape-of-life to uncover the major biological transitions from the last common ancestor of life that lived nearly 3.5 billion years ago. The Institute also will recreate the key steps in life's transition from non-coded proteins to proteins synthesized from a genetic template. This research will enable the team to characterize some of the oldest traceable macromolecules of life, and the earliest discernable connection between early and modern forms of life.