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Origin-of-life research strives to answer the questions how and under which circumstances the first replicating life forms emerged. Exploring billions of years in the past means that scientists rely heavily on extrapolation and assumptions to create a plausible scenario that could represent the environment on early Earth. To this end, disciplines ranging from astrobiology and geoscience to organic chemistry have to come together to contribute to the bigger picture.
To honour the difficulties of prebiotic research and to contribute to the exchange of ideas across scientific disciplines, we assembled this collection. The Experimental Conditions tab contains commissioned opinion pieces (comments) on the question: What settings are plausible when investigating the origin of life, precisely, when investigating the origin of genetic material (DNA/RNA)? The other three tabs contain research articles on early Earth conditions, the origin of nucleotides and nucleosides, and the early days of biochemistry (Early Cells) published in Nature Communications.
One of the questions for prebiotic chemistry is the formation of complementary base pairing systems. Here, the authors show that plausible two prebiotic heterocycles can form glycosidic bonds with ribose in water and that these spontaneously base-pair in aqueous solution.
How RNA building blocks have formed on an early Earth by a continuous process is still a mystery awaiting its solution. Here, the authors report that fluctuations of physical parameters like temperature and pH could have been enough to facilitate nucleoside formation from simple starting materials.
While mechanisms have been proposed for the prebiotic nucleotide synthesis, these require separate (and potentially incompatible) routes for pyrimidines and purines. Here the authors show that both of these classes of molecules can be formed by a divergent synthesis from a common prebiotic precursor.
A crucial transition in the origin of life was the emergence of self-replicating RNA and its compartmentalization within protocellular structures. Here it is shown that the physicochemical properties of ice, a simple medium widespread on a temperate early earth, could have mediated this transition.
Some oligomers exhibit liquid-crystal-like ordering in concentrated aqueous solutions. Here, Fraccia et al. show that this kind of ordering can further facilitate DNA ligation in a way similar to a catalytic process that arises from a hierarchical self-assembly, namely liquid crystal autocatalysis.
Arabinonucleic acid (ANA) Watson-Crick base-pair with RNA/DNA and can evolve to display enzyme-like function. Here, the authors now identify a prebiotic pathway that yields the complete set of Watson-Crick base-pairing purine and pyrimidine ANA nucleosides.
Sugars are known to form from the UV photoprocessing of ices under astrophysical conditions. Here, the authors report the detection of deoxyribose, the sugar of DNA, and other deoxysugars from the UV photoprocessing of H2O:CH3OH ice mixtures, which are compared with materials from carbonaceous meteorites.