Science with an ngVLA: Prebiotic Molecules
  Extraterrestrial amino acids, the chemical building blocks of the biopolymers
that comprise life as we know it on Earth are present in meteoritic samples.
More recently, glycine (NH$_2$CH$_2$COOH), the simplest amino acid, was
detected by the Rosetta mission in comet 67P. Despite these exciting
discoveries, our understanding of the chemical and physical pathways to the
formation of (pre)biotic molecules is woefully incomplete. This is largely
because our knowledge of chemical inventories during the different stages of
star and planet formation is incomplete. It is therefore imperative to solidify
our accounting of the chemical inventories, especially of critical yet
low-abundance species, in key regions and to use this knowledge to inform,
expand, and constrain chemical models of these reactions. This is followed
naturally by a requirement to understand the spatial distribution and temporal
evolution of this inventory. Here, we briefly outline a handful of
particularly-impactful use cases in which the ngVLA will drive the field
forward.
