Origin of Life Chemical Approach

Dedicated to the fond memory of two great pioneers of this science, Leslie E. Orgel and Stanley L. Miller, this compilation of reviews and original manuscripts provides an overview of the current state of the art, written by some of the eminent 'players? in this creative domain of 'explorative chemistry?. Since we are still far from finding a definitive answer to the most fundamental of questions in science, 'chemistry? here is defined in its broadest sense. It is against this background that the contributions cover such a wide range of theories, including chemistry and selection, evolution of the pioneer organism, chemical aspects of synthetic biology, ribozyme catalysis of metabolism in the RNA world, intractable mixtures and the origin of life, the chemical etiology of nucleic acids, interstellar amino acids, and even the chemistry that preceded life's origin. The majority of the articles reproduced in this volume originally appeared in a special issue of Chemistry & Biodiversity under the title 'On Chemistry Leading to Life?s Origin?.

Piet Herdewijn is Professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and head of the laboratory of medicinal chemistry at the Rega Institute. He obtained his Ph.D. and habilitation from the same university. He was a postdoctoral fellow of the Humboldt Foundation at the University of Konstanz. He has conducted research in bioorganic and medicinal chemistry, mainly in the field of nucleosides, nucleotides, and nucleic acids, at the University of Leuven, the University of Ghent, and the Universite d'Evry-Val-d'Essonne.