The origin of life is one of the great mysteries of science. Of course, no one was there to observe it and there are many reasons that it’s tricky to figure out how you could get a living thing from non-living material. Inspired by recent research in biological condensates, Alan and Jacob Fine (a PhD student in Ben Blencowe’s group) contemplate a new idea: life starts as bunch of polymers that stick together in a blob. This simple idea seems to get around many of the challenges for the origin of life. Check out their paper that was just posted.

An RNA condensate model for the origin of life: easy as 1-2-3.