Chapter category: Evolution
Planetary Astrobiology—The Outer Solar System
Prebiotic Evolution and Astrobiology
Edited by: J. Tze-Fei Wong and Antonio LazcanoISBN: 978-1-58706-330-5
» Get more information about this book at landesbioscience.com «
Chapter authors:
François Raulin
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François Raulin
LISA, Universités Paris 12 et Paris 7, CNRS
Additional chapters from this book:
The Minimal Cell
Markus Pech and Knud H. Nierhaus
In this chapter we consider the beginning of life under the aspect of common and minimal principles governing the existence of a cell, in particular we will take into account the question of “the mini...
Planetary Astrobiology—The Outer Solar System
François Raulin
Astrobiology, the study of Life in the Universe, is more precisely the study of the origins, evolution, distribution and destiny of life in the whole universe. This very wide and interdisciplinary dom...
Split Genes, Ancestral Genes
Massimo Di Giulio
If we think about the origin of genes, we almost inevitably imagine the primitive genetic system passing through an evolutionary stage characterised by genes just long enough to encode a few dozen ami...
Comets and Astrobiology
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For a very long time, comets were regarded as bad omens, linked to superstitions, wars, deaths, diseases, etc… But nothing was really known about these wandering objects, suddenly appearing and disapp...
The Primitive Earth
James F. Kasting
Understanding how life may have originated necessarily involves understanding the environment of the early Earth. This statement is true even if life originated somewhere else and was transported to ...
Precellular Evolution: Vesicles and Protocells
Pasquale Stano and Pier Luigi Luisi
Living organisms are all composed of cells. Multicellular organisms are composed of several kinds of specialized cells, spatially organized and interacting with each other in complex ways; unicellular...
Meteorites and the Chemistry That Preceded Life’s Origin
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Meteorites are pieces of extraterrestrial material that cross the Earth’s orbit, enter the terrestrial atmosphere and reach the ground without being completely destroyed. Some are known to have been e...
Ribozymes and the Evolution of Metabolism
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In a prebiotic World, organisms as we currently know them did not exist, but the molecules that carried information and performed catalysis would have arisen during this period of biochemical evolutio...
Chirality, Homochirality and the Order of Biomolecular Interactions
Sandra Pizzarello
Chirality is defined formally as the property of objects that cannot be brought into congruence with their mirror image by translation or rotation. The word derives from the Greek χει&#...
The Dawn of the RNA World: RNA Polymerization from Monoribonucleotides under Prebiotically Plausible Conditions
PierreAlain Monnard
The polymerization of RNA molecules from abiotically synthesized monoribonucleotides is a critical step in the emergence of a metabolism centered on the dual functions of RNA (genetic information repo...
