Characterizing the “Missing Era” of Prebiotic Evolution
POSTED BY: Sara Imari Walker
Despite these challenges, astrobiologists have managed to be clever enough to identify some of the key steps leading from nonlife to life. In particular, it is well recognized that a critical stage in the origin of life was the emergence of the first functional biopolymers – things that may have been akin to very primitive RNA or peptides (peptides are short sequences of amino acids much less complex than modern proteins). This early stage in evolution is relatively uncharacterized given that we know very little about the first ....