Scientists now question how life’s building blocks first appeared before LUCA, reshaping our search for life beyond Earth.

Ultimately, the gel-first hypothesis does not claim to provide a definitive answer to the origin of life. Rather, it offers a conceptual framework—one that integrates soft-matter physics, systems ...

In a new peer reviewed analysis, scientists quantify amino acids before and after our “last universal common ancestor.” The last universal common ancestor is the single life form that branched into ...

In many submerged regions, murky mud shelters strange life-forms that seem to be the key to one of the biggest mysteries of life on Earth. These creatures belong to a domain of life called the archaea ...

Few questions have captivated humankind more than the origin of life on Earth. How did the first living cells come to exist? How did these early protocells develop the structural membranes necessary ...

Researchers at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge have discovered a ribozyme that is shockingly small, yet ...