Main description:

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 todays 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.

Contents:

1

Astrochemistry, prebiotic chemistry in space

Marco Fioroni

2

Geo 1: Physicochemical conditions and processes in the Hadean and Archean crust, atmosphere and ocean - mineralogy, temperatures, pressures, redox conditions, meteoritic infall, radiation conditions, serpentinization...?

Shaunna Morrison, Robert Hazen, Anirudh Prabhu

3

Geo 2: Roles of specific reactive geological environments (black smokers, white smokers, warm little ponds, subsurface, pumice, impact craters, whole Earth, etc.) on the early Earth

Bill Martin

4

Origin of chirality

Axel Brandenburg

5

Origin of polypeptides

Valentina Erastova

6

Origin of nucleic acids (RNA world?)

Frank Trixler and Andrea Greiner

6

Origin of encapsulation

Michele Fiore, Augustin Lopez, Carolina Chieffo

7

Origin of replication with heredity

Oliver Trapp

8

Origin of viruses

Don Pan

9

Earliest fossil record

Sherry Cady, Barbara Cavalazzi

10

Nature of LUCA

Graham Budd and Anthony Pool

11

Origin of eukaryotes

Heda Agic