How can life originate from a lifeless chemical soup? This question has puzzled scientists since Darwin's 'Origin of species'. University of Groningen chemistry professor Sijbren Otto studies 'chemical evolution' to see if self-organization and autocatalysis will provide the answer. His research group previously developed self-replicating moleculesmolecules that can build copies of themselves—and fill now observed diversification in replicator mutants. They found that if you start with one ancestral set of replicator mutants,a moment set will branch off spontaneously. This means that ecological diversity as encountered in biology may well fill its roots at the molecular level. The results were published on Jan. 4, 2016, and in Nature Chemistry.
Source: phys.org