Mars Sample Return Program planning includes a series of spacecraft staged both on the Martian surface and in low-Mars-orbit (LMO).
The advancement of space exploration into an era of sample return missions from Mars, asteroids, and icy moons raises the potential for biological contamination either to or from Earth.
Both the geologic and genomic records provide information on the earliest history of terrestrial life.
Editor’s note: When we start to mount Astrobiology missions to explore ocean worlds we’ll need ways for our robotic submersibles to observe and interact with whatever life forms they may […]
Biological systems exhibit marked molecular asymmetry, with proteins based predominantly on L-amino acids and nucleic acids and carbohydrates largely composed of D-sugars.
Life demonstrates remarkable homochirality of its major building blocks: nucleic acids, amino acids, sugars, and phospholipids. Phospholipid bilayer vesicles (liposomes) are formed at the water/air interface from Langmuir layers and […]
Evolutionary biology has traditionally inferred process from patterns in extant organisms and the fossil record, leaving many foundational questions constrained by their historical nature.
A University of Texas at Austin-led team has reconstructed the most detailed map to date of the molecular machines that carried out the functions of life in an ancient ancestor […]
Proteins are constructed from a limited alphabet of ~20 amino acids, yet the origins and selection of this specific alphabet are unresolved.
Membranes are usually treated as passive containers in origin-of-life models, confining prebiotic chemistry, buffering diffusion, and sustaining gradients.
