Access
This article is part of Nature's premium content.
Published online 13 May 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.471
News
RNA world easier to make
Ingenious chemistry shows how nucleotides may have formed in the primordial soup.
An elegant experiment has quashed a major objection to the theory that life on Earth originated with molecules of RNA.
John Sutherland and his colleagues from the University of Manchester, UK, created a ribonucleotide, a building block of RNA, from simple chemicals under conditions that might have existed on the early Earth.
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
Comments
Reader comments are usually moderated after posting. If you find something offensive or inappropriate, you can speed this process by clicking 'Report this comment' (or, if that doesn't work for you, email webadmin@nature.com). For more controversial topics, we reserve the right to moderate before comments are published.
Faith in chemistry is so touching in Origins of Life studies. Nice to see some experimental data to back it up, at long last.
It is a big news but can they demonstrate the synthetic RNA is able to self replicate?
Indeed some recent research has shown various types of lab controlled replication. Also, new research on RNA bindable substrates is further adding credence to the idea of an early RNA based self-replicating molecule as the origin of life. It also seems likely that he metabolism first idea presented by Shapiro will also contribute in some fashion.
'cannot be tested' seems inappropriate in this age of space travel. Surely we can find an asteroid, comet or other body in space to serve as an experimental site, once we have a strong suspicion of the reactants and reaction order. I think too much origins research is dismissed for lack of imagination and will. Still, I think there has to be something before the RNA.
What is most promising is that it may lead us to be able to show, definitively, that man did not in fact ascend or evolve from apes [as I had always found odd] but rather we evolved along a seperate, but similar strain of the same... for lack of a better term, primordial ooze. Like the other prehistoric beasts, some went inland and some went back to the seas, and others still made for the trees. This is a wonderful study and I hope to read more.
wish to see the continuation of this work especially the purine ribonucleotides.