RNA World Hypothesis

Membraneless organelles, also called biomolecular condensates, are changing how scientists think about protein chemistry, various diseases and even the...

Many artists have tried to depict what Earth might have looked like billions of years ago, before life made its appearance. Many scenes trade snow-covered mountains for lava-gushing volcanoes and blue skies for lightning bolts pummeling what's below from a hazy sky.

From its humble origin(s), life has infected the entire planet with endless beautiful forms. The genesis of life is the oldest biological event, so old that no clear evidence was left behind other than the existence of life itself. This leaves many questions open, and one of the most tantalizing is how many times life magically emerged from non-living elements.

Though the exact origins of life on earth remain a mystery, the hypercycle helps explain the emergence of self-replication. In this post we'll learn about hypercycles and how to build a simulation using WebGL.

An anonymous reader shared this article from the Washington Post: A much-debated theory holds that 4 billion years ago, give or take, long before the appearance of dinosaurs or even bacteria, the primordial soup contained only the possibility of life. Then a molecule called RNA took a dramatic ste...

0 votes and 1 comment so far on Reddit

Nitriles play a key role as molecular precursors in prebiotic experiments based on the RNA-world scenario for the origin of life. These chemical compounds could have been partially delivered to the young Earth from extraterrestrial objects, stressing the importance of establishing the reservoir of nitriles in the interstellar medium. We report here the detection towards the molecular cloud G+0.693−0.027 of several…

A structure that links amino acids suggests that early organisms could have been based on an RNA-protein mix

When researchers gave a genetic molecule the ability to replicate, it evolved over time into a complex network of "hosts" and "parasites" that both competed and cooperated to survive.

Scientists at the Salk Institute have taken a small but essential step in showing how RNA might have kick-started life on our planet.

The biochemist Nick Lane thinks life first evolved in hydrothermal vents where precursors of metabolism appeared before genetic information. His ideas could lead us to think differently about aging and cancer.

Long-term experimental evolution shows that a single polymerase-encoding RNA replicator can evolve into a complex replicator network, shedding light on how a molecular replicator could have developed complexity before the emergence of life.

The answer to the origin of life remains unknown, but here are scientists best bets

Charles Darwin described evolution as "descent with modification." Genetic information in the form of DNA sequences is copied and passed down from one generation to the next. But this process must also be somewhat flexible, allowing slight variations of genes to arise over time and introduce new traits into the population.

Key precursors for life on Earth are abundant in interstellar molecular clouds and could have arrived on Earth inside comets and meteors. Nitriles, a class of organic molecules with a cyano group (a carbon atom bound with a triple unsaturated bond to a nitrogen atom) are typically toxic. But para

Peptide synthesis can take place directly on RNA, which suggests how a nucleic acid–protein world might have originated on early Earth.

0 votes and 1 comment so far on Reddit

Could the toxic gas used in chemical weapons today have been involved in the birth of life on Earth?

MIT Professor Xiao Wang's research is focused on developing tools that pinpoint where in a cell different types of messenger RNA are translated into proteins — information that can offer insight into how cells control their fate and what goes wrong in disease.

Letters to the editors for the June 2024 issue of Scientific American