Prebiotic Chemistry And The Origin Of Life

This book presents an overview of current views on the origin of life and its earliest evolution. Each chapter describes key processes, environments and transition on the long road from geochemistry and astrochemistry to biochemistry and finally to the ancestors of today ́s organisms. This book combines the bottom-up and the top-down approaches to life including the origin of key chemical and structural features of living cells and the nature of abiotic factors that shaped these features in primordial environments. The book provides an overview of the topic as well as its state of the art for graduate students and newcomers to the field. It also serves as a reference for researchers in origins of life on Earth and beyond.

Studying the origin of life is one of man’s greatest achievements over the last sixty years. The fields of interest encompassed by this quest are multiple and interdisciplinary: chemistry, physics, biology, biochemistry, mathematics, geology but also statistics, atmospheric science, meteorology, oceanography, and astrophysics. Recent scientific discoveries, such as water on Mars and the existence of super-Earths with atmospheres similar to primordial Earth, have pushed researchers to simulate prebiotic conditions in explaining the abiotic formation of molecules essential to life. This collection of articles offers an overview of recent discoveries in the field of prebiotic chemistry of biomolecules, their formation and selection, and the evolution of complex chemical systems.

Born from twenty-five years of experimental research and a decade of bibliographic studies, this publication delves into the fascinating theory of life's abiotic origins. It begins with simple amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, revealing how these compounds, present from the prebiotic era and discovered in ancient meteorites, may have been pivotal in life's evolutionary journey. Focusing particularly on amino acids' chirality—that is, their existence in mirror-image right and left forms—the author probes the critical enigma of their separation and why the left (L) form dominates in all known living beings. The book sparks a compelling discussion about how this bifurcation might have occurred at life's very inception and the ultimate fate of the right form. The text further extends its reach, proposing theories on the genetic code's origins, the selection of the 20 natural amino acids from many known, and a physical theory of consciousness in bacteria. "Prebiotic Chemistry and the Origin of Life" is more than a trek through the complexities of chemistry and molecular biology; it's an enthralling journey into some of life's most profound existential questions.

This book provides a broad but in-depth analysis of the latest discoveries in prebiotic chemistry from the microscopic to the macroscopic scale.

The origin of life from inanimate matter has been the focus of much research for decades, both experimentally and philosophically. Luisi takes the reader through the consecutive stages from prebiotic chemistry to synthetic biology, uniquely combining both approaches. This book presents a systematic course discussing the successive stages of self-organisation, emergence, self-replication, autopoiesis, synthetic compartments and construction of cellular models, in order to demonstrate the spontaneous increase in complexity from inanimate matter to the first cellular life forms. A chapter is dedicated to each of these steps, using a number of synthetic and biological examples. With end-of-chapter review questions to aid reader comprehension, this book will appeal to graduate students and academics researching the origin of life and related areas such as evolutionary biology, biochemistry, molecular biology, biophysics and natural sciences.

Studying the origin of life is one of man's greatest achievements over the last sixty years. The fields of interest encompassed by this quest are multiple and interdisciplinary: chemistry, physics, biology, biochemistry, mathematics, geology but also statistics, atmospheric science, meteorology, oceanography, and astrophysics. Recent scientific discoveries, such as water on Mars and the existence of super-Earths with atmospheres similar to primordial Earth, have pushed researchers to simulate prebiotic conditions in explaining the abiotic formation of molecules essential to life. This collection of articles offers an overview of recent discoveries in the field of prebiotic chemistry of biomolecules, their formation and selection, and the evolution of complex chemical systems.

This is the second of a divided two-part softcover edition of the "Lectures in Astrobiology Volume I" containing the sections "General Introduction", "From Prebiotic Chemistry to the Origin of Life on Earth" and "Appendices" including an extensive glossary on Astrobiology. "Lectures in Astrobiology" is the first comprehensive textbook at graduate level encompassing all aspects of the emerging field of astrobiology. Volume I of the Lectures in Astrobiology gathers a first set of extensive lectures that cover a broad range of topics, from the formation of solar systems to the quest for the most primitive life forms that emerged on the Early Earth.