Investigating Prebiotic Protocells for an Understanding of the Origin of Life: A Comprehensive Perspective Combining the Chemical, Evolutionary and Historical Aspects

The origin of life remains an unsolved scientific problem. It has been commonly recognized that a stage of primitive cellular form, i.e. the protocell, should have lain at the interface of non-life and life. In fact, over the past decades, there have been numerous experimental explorations on the chemical aspect of the protocells, and also a number of theoretic (modeling) studies dealing with their evolutionary aspect. But it is becoming clear that future investigation in this area could achieve significant advances only if we could bring the efforts from the two aspects together. In addition, certainly, we would also benefit a lot when taking account of clues coming from the historical aspect of the origin of life on our planet.