Life as we know it originated roughly 3.5 to 4 billion years ago in the form of a prebiotic (“before life”) soup of organic molecules that somehow began to replicate themselves and pass along a genetic formula. Or so goes the thinking behind the RNA World, one of the most robust hypotheses of the origin of life. Researchers have now found evidence that the amino acid arginine (or its prebiotic world equivalent) may have been a more important ingredient in this soup than previously thought.