How and where did life on Earth originate? To date, various environments have been
proposed as plausible sites for the origin of life. However, discussions have focused on a …

Habitability is a widely used word in the geoscience, planetary science, and astrobiology
literature, but what does it mean? In this review on habitability, we define it as the ability of …

Uncovers the Key Role Microbes Play in the Transformation of Oxidizable and Reducible
MineralsMany areas of geomicrobial processes are receiving serious attention from …

The mineralogy of terrestrial planets evolves as a consequence of a range of physical,
chemical, and biological processes. In pre-stellar molecular clouds, widely dispersed …

RNA has been called a “prebiotic chemist's nightmare” because of its combination of large
size, carbohydrate building blocks, bonds that are thermodynamically unstable in water, and …

Life is believed to have originated on Earth∼ 4.4–3.5 Ga ago, via processes in which
organic compounds supplied by the environment self-organized, in some geochemical …

One present obstacle to the “RNA-first” model for the origin of life is an inability to generate
reasonable “hands off” scenarios for the formation of carbohydrates under conditions where …

Phosphorus is a key biologic element, and a prebiotic pathway leading to its incorporation
into biomolecules has been difficult to ascertain. Most potentially prebiotic phosphorylation …

It has been hypothesized that before the emergence of modern DNA–RNA–protein life,
biology evolved from an “RNA world.” However, synthesizing RNA and other …

Astrobiology is the science that seeks to understand the story of life in our universe.
Astrobiology includes investigation of the conditions that are necessary for life to emerge …