期刊
NATURE CHEMISTRY
卷 9, 期 4, 页码 318-324出版社
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/NCHEM.2628
关键词
-
资金
- National Science Foundation (NSF)
- NASA Astrobiology Program under the NASA/NSF Center for Chemical Evolution [CHE-1504217]
- McDonnell Foundation 21st Century Science Initiative Grant on Studying Complex Systems [220020271]
- National Science Foundation [DGE-1148903]
- Division Of Chemistry
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien [1504217] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- MRC [MC_U105178804] Funding Source: UKRI
Many hypotheses concerning the nature of early life assume that genetic information was once transferred through the template-directed synthesis of RNA, before the emergence of coded enzymes. However, attempts to demonstrate enzymefree, template-directed synthesis of nucleic acids have been limited by 'strand inhibition', whereby transferring information from a template strand in the presence of its complementary strand is inhibited by the stability of the template duplex. Here, we use solvent viscosity to circumvent strand inhibition, demonstrating information transfer from a gene-length template (>300 nt) within a longer (545 bp or 3 kb) duplex. These results suggest that viscous environments on the prebiotic Earth, generated periodically by water evaporation, could have facilitated nucleic acid replication-particularly of long, structured sequences such as ribozymes. Our approach works with DNA and RNA, suggesting that viscositymediated replication is possible for a range of genetic polymers, perhaps even for informational polymers that may have preceded RNA.
作者
我是这篇论文的作者
点击您的名字以认领此论文并将其添加到您的个人资料中。
推荐
暂无数据