Ancient evidence suggests a new twist in how we all got here.

The mystery of why life uses molecules with specific orientations has deepened with a discovery that RNA—a key molecule thought to have potentially held the instructions for life before DNA ...

Earth’s chemical energy powered early life through ‘the most revolutionary idea in biology since Darwin’ For 80 years it has been accepted that early life began in a ‘primordial soup’ of organic ...

In living organisms today, complex molecules like RNA and DNA are constructed with the help of enzymes. So how did these molecules form before life (and enzymes) existed? Why did some molecules end up ...

A team from the University of Illinois has uncovered surprising evolutionary links between the genetic code and tiny protein fragments called dipeptides. By analyzing billions of dipeptide sequences ...

There is still so much we don’t understand about the origin of life on Earth. The definition of life itself is a source of debate among scientists, but most researchers agree on the fundamental ...

Few questions have captivated humankind more than the origin of life on Earth. How did the first living cells come to exist? How did these early protocells develop the structural membranes necessary ...

The emergence of the first biopolymers and their building blocks on the early Earth is considered a key moment in the origin of life (OoL), but how life began on the prebiotic Earth from a pile of ...

Something written in every biology textbook of the past 70 years may need a rewrite. Not because the science was careless, or the scientists were wrong to try – but because the tools available at the ...

In a peer-reviewed analysis, scientists quantify amino acids before and after our “last universal common ancestor.” The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) is the single life form that branched into ...