50 years after the historical Miller-Urey experiment, the formamide-based scenario is perhaps the most powerful concurrent hypothesis for the origin of life on our planet besides the traditional HCN-based concept. The information accumulated during the last 15 years in this topic is astonishingly growing and nowadays the formamide-based model represents one of the most complete and coherent pathways leading from simple prebiotic precursors up to the first catalytically active RNA molecules. In this work, we overview the major events of this long pathway that have emerged from recent experimental and theoretical studies, mainly concentrating on the mechanistic, methodological, and structural aspects of this research.

CEITEC Central European Institute of Technology Masaryk University Campus Bohunice Kamenice 5 62500 Brno Czech Republic

Dipartimento di Biologia e Biotecnologie Charles Darwin Sapienza Università di Roma Piazzale Aldo Moro 5 Rome 00185 Italy

Dipartimento di Scienze Ecologiche e Biologiche Università della Tuscia Via San Camillo De Lellis 01100 Viterbo Italy

Institute of Biophysics Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic Královopolská 135 61265 Brno Czech Republic

Istituto di Biologia e Patologia Molecolari CNR P le Aldo Moro 5 Rome 00185 Italy

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