Protocells and the Origin of Life

How life can emerge in a lifeless environment is one of the major open scientific challenges. This book pays particular attention to self-organization phenomena that might have led to the appearance of the first protocells, i.e. cell-like structures, much simpler than present-day cells, endowed with some primitive kinds of metabolism and heredity. After a brief description of the known facts and main hypotheses, mathematical and computational models of protocells are discussed: they should ...