Eschenmoser's early work on the cyclization of unsaturated, conjugated hydrocarbons directly contributed to advances in the field of terpene chemistry and provided insight into steroid biosynthesis.

In a remarkable collaboration with his colleague Robert Burns Woodward at Harvard University, a team of almost one hundred students and postdoctoral workers worked for many years on the total synthesis of this molecule.

This work demonstrated that hydrogen-bonding interactions between the base-paring surfaces of the nucleobases alone might not have provided sufficient selection pressure to lead to the eventual rise of ribose in the structure of modern nucleic acids.

He determined that pentose sugars, particularly ribose, conform to a geometry that contributes significantly to the helical structure of DNA by optimizing base-pair stacking distances in naturally occurring oligonucleotides.

John Chaput, a professor at UC Irvine, has theorized that issues concerning the prebiotic synthesis of ribose sugars and the non-enzymatic replication of RNA may provide circumstantial evidence of an earlier genetic system more readily produced under primitive earth conditions.