We present a testable hypothesis related to an origin of life on land in which fluctuating
volcanic hot spring pools play a central role. The hypothesis is based on experimental …

Prebiotic chemistry aims to explain how the biochemistry of life as we know it came to be.
Most efforts in this area have focused on provisioning compounds of importance to life by …

Phosphorus (P) is critical to modern biochemical functions and can control ecosystem
growth. It was presumably important as a reagent in prebiotic chemistry. However, on the …

The chemical reactions that formed the building blocks of life at origins required catalysts,
whereby the nature of those catalysts influenced the type of products that accumulated …

Over the last 70 years, prebiotic chemists have been very successful in synthesizing the
molecules of life, from amino acids to nucleotides. Yet there is strikingly little resemblance …

“One of the deepest, most illuminating books about the history of life to have been published
in recent years.”—The Economist The Earth teems with life: in its oceans, forests, skies and …

The reverse tricarboxylic acid (rTCA) cycle (also known as the reverse Krebs cycle) is a
central anabolic biochemical pathway whose origins are proposed to trace back to …

Hydrothermal fields on the prebiotic Earth are candidate environments for biogenesis. We
propose a model in which molecular systems driven by cycles of hydration and dehydration …

Chemical gardens are perhaps the best example in chemistry of a self-organizing
nonequilibrium process that creates complex structures. Many different chemical systems …

Iron oxyhydroxide minerals, known to be chemically reactive and significant for elemental
cycling, are thought to have been abundant in early-Earth seawater, sediments, and …