How did life on earth originate? Physicist Corinna Kufner wants to use ultrafast spectroscopy to shed light on this question. At the Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology (Leibniz IPHT) in Jena, she is establishing a junior group funded by the CZS Nexus program of the Carl Zeiss Foundation. Kufner’s research aims to gain fundamental insights into the origins of life and aging processes and to advance the development of photocatalysts for sustainable energy production – and could even provide clues as to the conditions under which life could develop on other planets.  

Researchers studying the origins of life often work in dark laboratories and with highly concentrated starting materials – far removed from the actual conditions on Earth billions of years ago. Dr. Corinna Kufner is taking a different approach: she wants to use ultrashort pulses of light to elucidate the reaction mechanisms in the primordial soup of early Earth – as mixed and dirty as it must have been.   

Into the Darkness of the Primordial Soup with Laser Light  

 “On the surface of the early Earth, the building blocks of life – molecules such as RNA, DNA, peptides and lipids – were exposed to sunlight. This could have influenced crucial reaction pathways that cannot be traced in dark laboratory experiments,” explains Corinna Kufner. Her goal is to uncover these unknown pathways and understand the mechanisms that light triggered in the primordial soup.  

Carl Zeiss Foundation Supports Establishment of New Research Group

To decipher the role of UV light in the development of life, Dr. Corinna Kufner is establishing a junior group at the Leibniz IPHT in Jena with funding from the Carl Zeiss Foundation as part of the CZS Nexus program. The Carl Zeiss Foundation’s support of 1.5 million euros will enable her to build up an interdisciplinary team and an independent laboratory in Jena for five years from January 1, 2025. Her research project “UV LiFE” combines approaches from physics, chemistry, astronomy, geochemistry and machine learning to address challenges in the field of Origins of Life research from a novel photochemical perspective. She combines ultrafast pump-probe spectroscopy with prebiotic photochemistry to uncover new reaction pathways and elucidate the underlying molecular mechanisms.  

Before coming to Jena, Corinna Kufner spent six years as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, where she established and led a laboratory for transient absorption spectroscopy. There she specialized in ultrafast pump-probe spectroscopy, a technique that makes extremely short molecular processes visible through time-resolved investigations with ultrashort light pulses.  

From Harvard to Jena with “Women in Photonics” 

Why Jena? The international career workshop “Women in Photonics”, with which the institute connects young female researchers with experts from science and industry, set the course for a move to Leibniz IPHT. Corinna Kufner participated in 2020 and got to know the institute and its technological infrastructure. “Leibniz IPHT combines exactly the disciplines that are essential for my research: Photonics, Chemistry and Life Sciences,” explains Kufner. 

“We are delighted that Leibniz IPHT and Jena have been able to recruit an excellent scientist in Corinna Kufner,” says Prof. Jürgen Popp, Scientific Director of Leibniz IPHT. For him, Kufner’s decision is also proof of the success of the institute’s strategic promotion of women: “The excellent infrastructure and opportunities for cooperation in Jena, especially with the Friedrich Schiller University and the German network, are ideal for advancing my interdisciplinary research and shedding new light on the origins of life.”  

She Discovered how DNA Can Repair UV Damage 

Kufner began her scientific career in Munich, where she received her PhD from Prof. Wolfgang Zinth. While studying the photochemistry of DNA oligonucleotides, she discovered a remarkable effect: “I found out that certain DNA sequences can repair UV-induced damage in a way that is otherwise only attributed to enzymes – but without enzymes,” explains Kufner. This discovery sparked her interest in prebiotics, the study of the chemical processes that led to the origin of life. She realized that these light-driven repair mechanisms may have been critical to Earth’s first protogenomes – precursors to today’s DNA and RNA. “That was the link,” says Kufner, “to understanding what was on Earth before the last common ancestors of all living organisms existed. 

Tools for Searching for Life on Other Planets 

After completing her Ph.D., Kufner was offered the opportunity to move to Harvard, where she established a transient absorption spectroscopy laboratory under the direction of Prof. Dimitar Sasselov, an expert in exoplanet research. Working with the astronomer opened up a new perspective for her: the astrobiological question of how life could develop on other planets became a topic of her research. With her project “UV LiFE” she wants to contribute to the generation of observables for space missions searching for life on other planets.