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Chemical origins of life

Prebiotic RNA unstuck

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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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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