Life as we know it could most likely not have emerged in absence of active geological processes and the environments shaped by them. The quest of the most probable environment(s) is amongst the most challenging and heavily debated topics on the emergence of life. A key challenge remains however to identify environments favorable for a plethora of reactions allowing to progress from the...
Pools of RNA oligomers are believed to play a central role for the spontaneous emergence of living systems. In suitable non-equilibrium environments, the RNA strands in such pools are thought to hybridize and dehybridize, ligate and break, such that they generate longer RNA molecules, which fold and function as ribozymes, ultimately enabling molecular evolution. However, concrete scenarios and...
