The Origin and Early Evolution of Life on Earth: A Laboratory in the School of Science

The study and research in the origin of life in Mexico have deep roots in the last century. However, the modern period of study of the origin and early evolution of life started in the early 1970s, when two groups were created to study the topic at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). The first of these groups began in 1974 in the School of Sciences and has continued to work since then: analyzing comets and meteors as models of chemical events that occurred in the early Earth; studying the central hypothesis of the “RNA world” and the role of modified ribonucleotides on the early stages of evolution; using bioinformatics tools and comparative genomics; and trying to infer very early stages of life. Here, we present a brief description of the main lines of research of the first group and the perspectives of the study of the origin and early evolution of life. This chapter addresses a question that does not have a model site, since the environmental conditions where it arose are still unknown. Nevertheless, many inferences can be made out of experiments and comparative genomics.