[photochemsyn]

Current origin-of-life theories are pretty diverse, but a very promising approach postulates the ribosome, the protein synthesis machine composed of proteins and RNA, as the original self-replicating entity. This model supposes the abiotic synthesis of both simple amino acids and nucleosides, the building blocks of proteins and nucleic acids, and some kind of random polymerization process.

If such random polymers were able to assemble into something like the ribosome, that structure could plausibly start replicating itself using the abiotic pool of free amino acids and nucleosides. This is somewhat different from older 'RNA world' theories in that it involves both amino acids and nucleosides. Abiotic synthesis of these precursors is fairly plausible.