RNA has long been thought to be a key molecule in the primordial soup that was Earth a few billion years ago, because it can not only store genetic information but also act as an enzyme—two key functions needed for the development of life as we know it. But whether RNA-based life really existed, what it looked like, and how it evolved into the DNA-, RNA-, and protein-based organisms of today have remained open questions.
Now, a study published yesterday (May 11) in Nature points to the possibility that RNAs may have played a role in building early proteins by simply linking amino acids together. Thomas Carell, an organic chemist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany, and his colleagues created synthetic RNA molecules that could produce peptides up to 15 amino acids long.
The discovery “opens up vast and fundamentally new avenues of pursuit for early chemical evolution,” ...
