Bell, E. A., Boehnke, P., Harrison, T. M. & Mao, W. L. Potentially biogenic carbon preserved in a 4.1 billion-year-old zircon. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 112, 14518–14521 (2015).

Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

Orgel, L. E. The origin of life on the earth. Sci. Am. 271, 76–83 (1994).

Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Trainer, M. G. et al. Organic haze on Titan and the early Earth. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 103, 18035–18042 (2006).

Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

Reed, N. W., Wing, B. A., Tolbert, M. A. & Browne, E. C. Trace H2S promotes organic aerosol production and organosulfur compound formation in archean analog haze photochemistry experiments. Geophys. Res. Lett. 49, e2021GL097032 (2022).

Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

Zahnle, K. J., Lupu, R., Catling, D. C. & Wogan, N. Creation and evolution of impact-generated reduced atmospheres of early Earth. Planetary Sci. J. 1, 11 (2020).

Article  Google Scholar 

Hud, N. V., Cafferty, B. J., Krishnamurthy, R. & Williams, L. D. The origin of RNA and ‘my grandfather’s axe’. Chem. Biol. 20, 466–474 (2013).

Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Brack, A. Selective emergence and survival of early polypeptides in water. Orig. Life Evol. Biosph. 17, 367–379 (1987).

Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Schneider, C. et al. Noncanonical RNA nucleosides as molecular fossils of an early Earth—generation by prebiotic methylations and carbamoylations. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 57, 5943–5946 (2018).

Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

Deamer, D. The role of lipid membranes in life’s origin. Life 7, 5 (2017).

Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

Kim, S. C. et al. A model for the emergence of RNA from a prebiotically plausible mixture of ribonucleotides, arabinonucleotides, and 2′-deoxynucleotides. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 142, 2317–2326 (2020).

Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

Frenkel-Pinter, M. et al. Selective incorporation of proteinaceous over nonproteinaceous cationic amino acids in model prebiotic oligomerization reactions. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 116, 16338–16346 (2019).

Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

Runnels, C. M. et al. Folding, assembly, and persistence: the essential nature and origins of biopolymers. J. Mol. Evol. 86, 598–610 (2018).

Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

Cleaves II, H. J. The origin of the biologically coded amino acids. J. Theor. Biol. 263, 490–498 (2010).

Article  Google Scholar 

Vincent, L. et al. Chemical ecosystem selection on mineral surfaces reveals long-term dynamics consistent with the spontaneous emergence of mutual catalysis. Life 9, 80 (2019).

Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

Cafferty, B. J. et al. Robustness, entrainment, and hybridization in dissipative molecular networks, and the origin of life. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 141, 8289–8295 (2019).

Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Segré, D., Ben-Eli, D. & Lancet, D. Compositional genomes: prebiotic information transfer in mutually catalytic noncovalent assemblies. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 97, 4112–4117 (2000).

Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

Kroiss, D., Ashkenasy, G., Braunschweig, A. B., Tuttle, T. & Ulijn, R. V. Catalyst: can systems chemistry unravel the mysteries of the chemical origins of life? Chem 5, 1917–1920 (2019).

Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

Ashkenasy, G., Hermans, T. M., Otto, S. & Taylor, A. F. Systems chemistry. Chem. Soc. Rev. 46, 2543–2554 (2017).

Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Guttenberg, N., Virgo, N., Chandru, K., Scharf, C. & Mamajanov, I. Bulk measurements of messy chemistries are needed for a theory of the origins of life. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. A 375, 20160347 (2017).

Article  Google Scholar 

Wołos, A. et al. Synthetic connectivity, emergence, and self-regeneration in the network of prebiotic chemistry. Science 369, eaaw1955 (2020).

Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Miao, X. et al. Kinetic selection in the out‐of‐equilibrium autocatalytic reaction networks that produce macrocyclic peptides. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 133, 20529–20538 (2021).

Article  Google Scholar 

Cao, Y. et al. Self‐synthesizing nanorods from dynamic combinatorial libraries against drug resistant cancer. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 133, 3099–3107 (2021).

Article  Google Scholar 

Komáromy, D., Nowak, P. & Otto, S. in Dynamic Covalent Chemistry: Principles, Reactions, and Applications 31–119 (Wiley, 2017).

Chvykov, P. et al. Low rattling: a predictive principle for self-organization in active collectives. Science 371, 90–95 (2021).

Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Otto, S., Furlan, R. L. & Sanders, J. K. Selection and amplification of hosts from dynamic combinatorial libraries of macrocyclic disulfides. Science 297, 590–593 (2002).

Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Lam, R. T. et al. Amplification of acetylcholine-binding catenanes from dynamic combinatorial libraries. Science 308, 667–669 (2005).

Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Liu, B. et al. Complex molecules that fold like proteins can emerge spontaneously. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 141, 1685–1689 (2018).

Article  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

Carnall, J. M. et al. Mechanosensitive self-replication driven by self-organization. Science 327, 1502–1506 (2010).

Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Kahana, A. & Lancet, D. Self-reproducing catalytic micelles as nanoscopic protocell precursors. Nat. Rev. Chem. 5, 870–878 (2021).

Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Mamajanov, I. et al. Ester formation and hydrolysis during wet–dry cycles: generation of far-from-equilibrium polymers in a model prebiotic reaction. Macromolecules 47, 1334–1343 (2014).

Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

Damer, B. & Deamer, D. The hot spring hypothesis for an origin of life. Astrobiology 20, 429–452 (2020).

Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

Foster, K., Hillman, B., Rajaei, V., Seng, K. & Maurer, S. Evolution of realistic organic mixtures for the origins of life through wet–dry cycling. Sci 4, 22 (2022).

Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

Li, Z. et al. The oligomerization of glucose under plausible prebiotic conditions. Orig. Life Evol. Biosph. 49, 225–240 (2019).

Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Jia, T. Z. et al. Incorporation of basic α-hydroxy acid residues into primitive polyester microdroplets for RNA segregation. Biomacromolecules 22, 1484–1493 (2021).

Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Jia, T. Z. & Chandru, K. Recent progress in primitive polyester synthesis and membraneless microdroplet assembly. Biophys. Physicobiol. 20, e200012 (2023).

CAS  Google Scholar