Primordial soup

Primordial soup is a hypothetical mixture of simple chemicals in early Earth's waters that supplied raw materials for organic molecules and, eventually, life.

Prebiotic chemistry: Chemical processes that produced biologically relevant molecules before life existed. It names the broader chemical setting in which the proposed soup could yield life's precursors.
Alexander Oparin: A Soviet biochemist who proposed that life arose through chemical evolution in Earth's early environment. His 1924 proposal helped establish the idea of an organic-rich early-Earth environment.
Hydrothermal vent: An underwater opening where geothermally heated, mineral-rich fluids emerge from Earth's crust. Vent-origin models place prebiotic chemistry in mineral-rich seafloor environments rather than a broad surface ocean.
Origin of life: The scientific problem of explaining how life first emerged from nonliving matter on Earth or elsewhere. The soup hypothesis addresses only part of this larger problem.
Amino acid: An organic molecule containing amino and carboxyl groups; amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. Amino acids were among the organic products formed in the Miller–Urey experiment.
J. B. S. Haldane: A British biologist who independently proposed that early Earth's conditions enabled the chemical evolution of life. His 1929 account helped popularize the early ocean as a setting for prebiotic chemistry.
Alkaline hydrothermal vent: A seafloor vent that releases alkaline fluids through reactions between water and oceanic rock. Its natural chemical gradients offer a specific vent-based alternative to the dilute-soup setting.
Homochirality: The predominance of one molecular handedness, or chirality, in biological systems. Prebiotic chemistry must explain why life uses particular molecular handednesses.
Nucleobase: A nitrogen-containing molecule that forms part of nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA and RNA. Nucleobases are another class of information-bearing molecule investigated in prebiotic chemistry.
Oparin–Haldane hypothesis: A hypothesis that life arose through gradual chemical evolution in Earth's early environment before biological evolution began. The primordial soup is a central feature of this broader account of life's chemical origins.

Linked from 2 pages