Previous reports on the synthesis of potentially prebiotic phospholipids used substrates (e.g. choline, glycerophosphocholine, and lysophosphatidylcholine) for which no prebiotic syntheses had been described (Fig. ). Moreover, no bottom-up prebiotic investigation has yet addressed the predominance of 2-amino alcohol motifs or the ubiquity of sn-glycerol-3-phosphodiesters (or their enantiomers, sn-glycerol-1-phosphodiesters) in modern phospholipids. Our work addresses these key issues.