Topic: Prebiotic chemistry

The University of Chicago’s origins-of-life fellowship supports early-career scientists studying prebiotic chemistry, the development and evolution of protocells, and potentially habitable environments on Earth and elsewhere. Fellows collaborate with existing research groups, with particular interest in projects spanning disciplinary boundaries. Appointments run for renewable one-year terms, up to four years, with an annual salary of US$80,000, benefits and a separate research fund. Starts are negotiable, with fall 2027 targeted. Application review begins 20 November 2026; reference letters ar

Steven Strogatz explores the origins of life with Jack Szostak and Betül Kaçar. Szostak considers how early-Earth chemistry, including cyanide-bearing environments, could give rise to precursors of RNA and DNA, and discusses competing settings for life’s beginnings. Kaçar explains how reconstructing ancient genes helps researchers investigate the evolution of essential biological processes. Together, the conversations examine what experiments can reveal about the earliest steps toward life and whether replaying evolutionary history would produce different outcomes.

The question of the origin of homochirality of living matter, or the dominance of one handedness for all molecules of life across the entire biosphere, is a long-standing puzzle in the research on the Origin of Life. In the fifties, Frank proposed a mechanism to explain homochirality based on the properties of a simple autocatalytic network containing only a few chemical species. Following this work, chemists struggled to find experimental realizations of this model, possibly due to a lack of proper methods to identify autocatalysis [1]. In any case, a model based on a few chemical species see