Open questions in understanding life's origins

Christopher J Butch; Markus Meringer; Jean-Sebastien Gagnon; H James Cleaves 2nd

doi:10.1038/s42004-021-00448-8

Open questions in understanding life's origins

Commun Chem. 2021 Feb 2;4(1):11. doi: 10.1038/s42004-021-00448-8.

Authors

Christopher J Butch^{1

2

3}, Markus Meringer⁴, Jean-Sebastien Gagnon^{5

6}, H James Cleaves 2nd^{7

8

9

10}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China.
² Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan.
³ Blue Marble Space Institute for Science, Seattle, WA, USA.
⁴ German Aerospace Center (DLR), Earth Observation Center (EOC), Oberpfaffenhofen-Wessling, Germany.
⁵ Physics Department, Norwich University, Northfield, VT, USA.
⁶ Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
⁷ Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan. henderson.cleaves@gmail.com.
⁸ Blue Marble Space Institute for Science, Seattle, WA, USA. henderson.cleaves@gmail.com.
⁹ Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USA. henderson.cleaves@gmail.com.
¹⁰ Center for Chemical Evolution, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA. henderson.cleaves@gmail.com.

Abstract

The chemical space of prebiotic chemistry is extremely large, while extant biochemistry uses only a few thousand interconnected molecules. Here we discuss how the connection between these two regimes can be investigated, and explore major outstanding questions in the origin of life.