Conspectus We must accelerate the pace at which we make technological advancements to
address climate change and disease risks worldwide. This swifter pace of discovery requires …

The search for definitive biosignatures—unambiguous markers of past or present life—is a
central goal of paleobiology and astrobiology. We used pyrolysis–gas chromatography …

It is challenging to evaluate the relevance of any given chemical system or geological
environment to the origin of life. At the same time, life is the product of prebiotic chemistry …

Carbohydrate biosynthesis is fundamental to modern terrestrial biochemistry, but how this
collection of metabolic pathways originated remains an open question. Prebiotic sugar …

This theoretical work harnesses the power of an open-access, blockchain-based platform for
distributed computing to generate the largest-known network of prebiotic reactions and then …

Autocatalytic chemical networks play a predominant role in a large number of natural
systems such as in metabolic pathways and in ecological networks. Despite recent efforts …

Autocatalysis has been proposed to play critical roles during abiogenesis. These proposals
are at odds with a limited number of known examples of abiotic (and, in particular, inorganic) …

During the past decade promising methods for computational prediction of electron
ionization mass spectra have been developed. The most prominent ones are based on …

A key question in origin-of-life research is how primitive life or life-like systems obtained
reusable and reprogrammable machinery of processing information to respond to various …

Understanding the origin (s) of life (OoL) is a fundamental challenge for science in the 21st
century. Research on OoL spans many disciplines, including chemistry, physics, biology …