In a peer-reviewed analysis, scientists quantify amino acids before and after our “ last universal common ancestor .” The ...

How did the building blocks of life come together to spawn the first organisms? It’s one of the most longstanding questions in biology — and scientists just got a major clue. In a new study published ...

The question of how life appeared on Earth has intrigued generations. Some researchers are now putting forward an unexpected hypothesis: our planet may have been prepared by an intelligence from ...

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 ...

Who were our earliest ancestors? The answer could lie in a special group of single-celled organisms with a cytoskeleton similar to that of complex organisms, such as animals and plants. Ten years ago, ...

Chemists at UCL have shown how two of biology’s most fundamental ingredients, RNA (ribonucleic acid) and amino acids, could have spontaneously joined together at the origin of life four billion years ...

When a bone grows, our bodies’ proteins help provide the structure. When a muscle tears, proteins help rebuild it. When we fight an infection, transport oxygen in our blood or send messages to a cell, ...

Tremendous progress in the field of prebiotic chemistry has shown how simple compounds available on ancient Earth could have given rise to the molecular building blocks of life 1. The current ...