Two of our Editorial Board members, H.J. Cleaves and J. Peter Gogarten, will be assuming Executive Editor positions. Since its inception, Origins of Life has been a one-man operation, with, successively, Cyril Ponnamperuma, Jim Ferris,

and myself as Editors. In today’s world of increasing specialization, it is becoming increasingly difficult for one editor to be sufficiently find more familiar with the entire breath of the journal’s coverage, or to easily identify and contact appropriate reviewers for every manuscript which is submitted. The new Executive Editors will act independently to stimulate, evaluate, and reach final decisions on new submissions within their areas of expertize. Jim Cleaves has a background in prebiotic chemistry, geochemistry and astrobiology. He is associated with the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Science, in Washington, Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitor Library solubility dmso D.C. Peter

Gogarten is a specialist in Molecular and Early Biological Evolution, and is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT. I am delighted that I will able to rely on their increased involvement in OLEB in the future.”
“A retired west-coast (U.S.A.) business man has surprised the origin of life community by announcing a major prize for origin of life research. The $50,000 award and up to $2,000,000 in potential research funding are offered “…for the best original

proposal pertaining to the study of the origin of life on Earth, including an outline of work to be performed…” The sponsor of the prize, Harry Lonsdale, will announce the competition at ORIGINS 2011 in Montpellier (http://​www.​origins2011.​univ-montp2.​fr/​). While vaguely similar-sounding announcements have appeared before, this seems to be completely authentic and a panel of experts well-known to the community has been assembled to evaluate applications. Details can be found at: www.​originlife.​org. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Edoxaban License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.”
“Introduction Even though the presence of sulfur-containing compounds in proteins had been known since the mid-19th century, it was only with the laborious work of John Mueller in the early 1920s that one of the components was identified as an amino acid other than cysteine. Using 45–68 kg of casein, Mueller successfully isolated 100–200 g of an amino acid that he assigned the empirical formula C5H11SNO2 (Mueller 1923a; Mueller 1923b).