The astonishing story of complex cells

This is an exciting time to study life's origins. New voyages of exploration across continents and oceans have uncovered an incredible diversity of cellular forms, and hints of primordial cells seemingly unchanged for billions of years. What drove those earliest cells to make the leap from a streamlined prokaryotic cell plan to the complex and versatile eukaryotic design? The eukaryotic membrane traffic system, connecting endomembrane organelles by vesicular transport, is essential to eukaryotic biology but completely absent in prokaryotes. How is the membrane traffic system assembled through dynamic protein interactions and information flow? And how did it get this way over billions of years of evolution? We bring together threads from biology, physics and computer science to weave the story of the past, present and future of cellular life.