concept

Prebiotic chemistry

The chemistry of the reactions that could have produced life's raw materials before there was any life — from volcanic gas, water and light to amino acids, sugars, nucleobases and fatty acids. It is the part of the origin problem that has advanced furthest: monomers form fairly readily under a range of plausible conditions, and meteorites deliver more of them. The difficulty is not making the parts; it is everything after that.