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Essays on the Emergence of Life​

New essays about recent discoveries in the emergence of life will be posted here soon. The essays listed below (with links to pdfs) were originally published online as part of the Origin of Life Focus Group within the NASA Astrobiology Institute.   

  • Origins of life, a Few Comments and an Update (2015) Sandra Pizzarello  pdf
  • On the Origins of Biological Homochirality (2015) Sandra Pizzarello  pdf
  • The influence of environment in shaping RNA fitness landscapes (2015) Shreyas S. Athavale  pdf
  • Yin and Yang: Polypeptide and Polynucleotide (2013) Loren Dean Williams  pdf
  • Putting together the pieces: Evidence suggests that RNA was a product of evolution (2013) Brian Cafferty and Nicholas V. Hud  pdf 
  • The origin of RNA – a small part of the bigger picture (2013) Frank R. Bowler and John D. Sutherland  pdf  
  • A genetic code from RNA chemistry: binding sites for amino acids and peptides (2013) Michael Yarus  pdf 
  • In Search for Alternative Genetic Material (2012) Philip Hollinger and Steven Benner  pdf
  • The Early Evolution of Lipid Membranes (2012) David Moreira, Jonathan Lombard and Purificación López-García  pdf
  • Coevolution of ribosomal proteins and RNA: evidence against the RNA world hypothesis (2012) Gustavo Caetano-Anollés  pdf 
  • Excess mutual catalysis is required for effective evolvability (2012) Omer Markovitch and Doron Lancet  pdf ​
  • Minimal catalytic and replicating systems (2011) David Deamer  pdf
  • tRNA pieces in archaeal genomes, what do they tell us? (2011) Kosuke Fujishima  pdf
  • The state of Astrobiology: From the President of the International Society for Studying the Origins of Life (ISSOL) (2009) Janet Siefert  pdf 
  • Evidence for a New Root of the Tree of Life (2008) James A. Lake  pdf 
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