While the Origin of Life remains a topic of ongoing debate, there is a broad consensus among scientists that life emerged from chemical processes. The key question is: "Which chemical processes?" Prebiotic chemists focus on explaining how complex biomolecules could have arisen from the chemical conditions present on the early Earth, around 4 billion years ago.

Prebiotic chemistry is a distinctive interdisciplinary field that integrates knowledge from biology, chemistry, and geology. Although the goals are extraordinarily challenging, the field has achieved numerous significant milestones, including the synthesis of nucleosides and amino acids.

Since the first successful prebiotic chemistry experiments in 1953, researchers have amassed a wealth of knowledge about the conditions that could have supported the formation of biomolecules on the early Earth. However, navigating this vast body of knowledge can be challenging, often demanding extensive literature review.

Scientists in related fields have benefited greatly from comprehensive databases that provide free access to data for both researchers and automated systems. Therefore, we aim to become a vital resource for retrieving information about prebiotic chemistry.

ChemOrigins offers access to a comprehensive knowledge graph focused on prebiotic chemistry. This graph connects molecules with the reactions that produce or consume them, as well as the evidence supporting these reactions. This is achieved through the curation of experimental prebiotic chemistry literature and the analysis of this knowledge using a graph database.

With ChemOrigins, you can explore questions such as: "How can alanine be abiotically produced?", "At what temperatures has the synthesis of nucleotides been measured?" or "Which reactions are catalyzed by magnetite?""

Our goal is to provide answers to these and other complex queries through our database.

You can contribute by joining the discussion in the GitHub repository. You can either start new threads in the issues section or fork the repository to annotate new reactions.

You can cite this work as: Cuevas-Zuviria, B., Adam, Z., Cove, D. Kaçar, B. ChemOrigins: a community-curated database for origins-of-life chemistry. Interface Focus 15, (2025). .

You can also check the original publication here