In 1991, De Duve proposed a hypothesis about the origin of life that did not require any deity: the thioester world, a compound containing carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur. On that primordial planet, still devoid of life, thioesters would have provided the energy necessary for chemical elements to react and form more complex molecules, such as the first genetic material, RNA.
At life's functional core, there is a complex and inseparable interplay between nucleic acids and proteins, but the origin of this relationship remains a mystery. Although nucleic acids store, replicate and transmit sequence information through their inherent structural capacity for molecular (self-)recognition6,7,8,9, proteins are the molecular, structural and catalytic workhorses of life. Unlike nucleic acids, peptides do not innately replicate in a sequence-specific manner10,11, so life must control and transmit the peptide sequences that are essential to its survival through nucleic acid encoding12.
"This is the first time, as far as I know, that anybody has done anything like this - generate a structure that has the properties of life from something, which is completely homogeneous at the chemical level and devoid of any similarity to natural life."