Major transitions in Life and Evolution: Crossing Boundaries in Living Systems

This symposium, “Major transitions in Life and Evolution: Crossing Boundaries in Living Systems,” will bring together researchers who study living systems at two fundamental boundaries: the boundary between life and nonlife, and the boundary between unicellular and multicellular organization. These two transitions are usually discussed in different communities, but they raise a common scientific question: how does a collection of molecules or cells acquire, maintain, lose, or transform the organizational properties that we call “living”? The workshop will create a focused venue in which experimental microbiology, synthetic and artificial cell research, evolutionary biology, biophysics, mathematical biology, dynamical-systems theory, and machine learning can be discussed within a shared conceptual framework.

The scientific scope is centered on transitions in the state of living systems rather than on a single organism, technique, or scale. Topics will include cellular death and revival, dormancy and slowed life, artificial cells and minimal self-maintaining systems, microbial collectives and biofilms, cell-to-cell heterogeneity, primitive differentiation, the emergence of division of labor, and the theoretical description of transitions between qualitatively distinct biological regimes. A central aim is to compare two kinds of “crossing”: crossing from life toward nonlife or from nonlife toward life and crossing from solitary unicellular life toward multicellular organization. By placing these themes side by side, the workshop will ask whether concepts such as robustness, memory, controllability, phase transition, division of labor, and self-maintenance can provide general principles that apply across major biological transitions.

The proposal fits the criterion of scientific excellence through the novelty, timeliness, and significance of the topic. The life–nonlife boundary has become experimentally accessible through quantitative single-cell measurements, microfluidics, artificial cell construction, and computational modeling, while the origin of multicellularity is being reconsidered through new observations of cell-to-cell variation and metabolic heterogeneity within unicellular populations. These developments make it timely to organize a meeting that does not simply collect case studies but explicitly compares mechanisms of boundary crossing across systems. The planned invited speaker list will include leading researchers in microbial physiology, quantitative biology, soft-matter and cellular biophysics, artificial cells, and collective cellular behavior. The format will combine invited talks, selected short talks, poster sessions, and open discussions so that both established researchers and junior participants can engage with the emerging conceptual questions.

The proposal strongly satisfies the criterion of interdisciplinarity. The two organizing research communities (JSPS Transformative Research Area (B) project teams) already span microbiology, artificial cell research, statistical physics, dynamical-systems theory, theoretical biology, eukaryotic and prokaryotic model systems, and engineered cell-like systems. Sessions will be organized around shared questions: What variables distinguish life from nonlife? How are differentiated cellular states generated and maintained? How do metabolic, mechanical, ecological, and informational constraints shape transitions in living systems? What can artificial systems reveal by reconstructing or failing to reconstruct biological transitions? This structure is intended to make the talks accessible to a broad scientific panel and to stimulate genuine cross-field discussion.

The workshop will be highly relevant to OIST researchers and to potential inter-unit collaborations. OIST is an ideal venue because its research culture encourages direct interaction between experimental life science, physics, chemistry, mathematics, computation, and engineering. Beyond the Yokoyama Group, several OIST units have clear intellectual connections to the workshop. The Pao Unit studies time-dependent complex systems, causal inference, instability, early warning signals, and low-dimensional manifolds in biological and networked data; this connects directly to identifying dynamical signatures of life–nonlife transitions, dormancy, revival, and differentiation. The Esposito Unit develops theory at the interface of information theory, probability, and statistics, with applications including learning theory, estimation, and computational biology; this could support collaborations on how biological systems encode memory, transmit information, and approach limits of reliable state discrimination across transitions. The Pigolotti Unit studies stochastic fluctuations in biological systems using theoretical and computational approaches from non-equilibrium statistical physics; this is directly relevant to noise-driven differentiation, survival strategies, energetic constraints, and rare transitions between living states. The Nakayama Unit investigates biological form and design principles across cell biology, development, evolution, biomechanics, and synthetic biology, including artificial models and biofabrication; this provides a natural connection to the emergence of multicellular structure and constructive approaches to biological organization. Through open sessions, posters, and informal discussions, the workshop can connect invited speakers with these units and seed collaborations on theory, data analysis, artificial-cell design, and experimental reconstruction.

Expected benefits to OIST include exposure to an emerging international research area, new contacts for future joint work, and the possibility of positioning OIST as a hub for quantitative and interdisciplinary studies of major biological transitions in Asia and beyond. The hybrid format will broaden access while preserving the intensive in-person exchanges needed to establish collaborations.

The workshop also addresses diversity and international balance. The speaker program will be designed to include researchers from Japan, Asia, Europe, and North America, and to balance senior leaders with rising investigators. Gender balance will be considered in the selection of invited speakers, short talks, and poster presenters. Because the field itself is distributed across different disciplines and countries, the workshop will use open advertisement and abstract-based selection to attract junior researchers from a broad range of backgrounds.

Although this application is for an OIST-funded workshop rather than a formal Partnership Workshop, the meeting will strengthen strategic connections between OIST and two active Japanese research networks funded by JSPS: “Life–Nonlife Transition” and “Crossing the border between unicellular and multicellular organisms.” These networks provide complementary expertise: the former focuses on the emergence and loss of living properties, while the latter focuses on the evolutionary transition from unicellular to multicellular life. Bringing them together at OIST will create a distinctive international platform for discussing major transitions in life and evolution. The organizers will also explore supplementary support through these networks and related funding sources, which may help expand participation by early-career researchers. Overall, the workshop is designed as a scientifically excellent, timely, interdisciplinary, and internationally visible meeting that will generate new ideas and collaborations around one of the most fundamental questions in modern science: how living systems cross boundaries between qualitatively different forms of organization.

*OIST members are welcome to attend all scientific sessions. Meals are closed sessions for registered participants only.

Workshop website: https://www.oist.jp/conference/major-transitions-life-and-evolution-crossing-boundaries-living-systems

OIST is deeply committed to the advancement of women in science, in Japan and worldwide. Women are strongly encouraged to apply.