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Chemical origins of life

Prebiotic RNA unstuck

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Non-enzymatic copying of an RNA template is appealing as a transition from pre-life to an RNA world, but it has been difficult to demonstrate in the laboratory. Now, two separate studies focusing on RNA's backbone connectivity offer partial solutions to some of the problems raised with this hypothesis for the origin of life.

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Figure 1: The path from prebiotic chemistry to the RNA world is likely to have involved template-directed RNA replication.
Figure 2: RNA backbone linkages and substrate activation chemistry.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Armando Hernández is in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Joseph Piccirilli is in the Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and Chemistry at the University of Chicago, 929 East 57th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA,

    Armando R. Hernández & Joseph A. Piccirilli

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  1. Armando R. Hernández
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  2. Joseph A. Piccirilli
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Correspondence to Joseph A. Piccirilli.

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Hernández, A., Piccirilli, J. Prebiotic RNA unstuck. Nature Chem 5, 360–362 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchem.1636

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