ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2011
Evolution of functional nucleic acids in the presence of nonheritable backbone heterogeneity.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 56 citations in OpenAlex.
- Impact of 2'-deoxyribo-purine substrates on nonenzymatic RNA template-directed primer extension.Nucleic acids research · 2025Article
- Three Biopolymers and Origin of Life Scenarios.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- On the origin of life: an RNA-focused synthesis and narrative.RNA (New York, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Formation of the Codon Degeneracy during Interdependent Development between Metabolism and Replication.Genes · 2021Article
- Prebiotic Photochemical Coproduction of Purine Ribo- and Deoxyribonucleosides.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2021Article
- Efficient affinity ranking of fluorinated ligands byJournal of biomolecular NMR · 2020Article
- Article
- A Model for the Emergence of RNA from a Prebiotically Plausible Mixture of Ribonucleotides, Arabinonucleotides, and 2'-Deoxynucleotides.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2020Article
- The role of sugar-backbone heterogeneity and chimeras in the simultaneous emergence of RNA and DNA.Nature chemistry · 2019Article
- Inosine, but none of the 8-oxo-purines, is a plausible component of a primordial version of RNA.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Molecular Mechanism for Folding Cooperativity of Functional RNAs in Living Organisms.Biochemistry · 2018Article
- Reciprocal Nucleopeptides as the Ancestral Darwinian Self-Replicator.Molecular biology and evolution · 2018Article
- What Does "the RNA World" Mean to "the Origin of Life"?Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2017Article
- A Mechanistic Explanation for the Regioselectivity of Nonenzymatic RNA Primer Extension.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2017Article
- Orotidine-Containing RNA: Implications for the Hierarchical Selection (Systems Chemistry Emergence) of RNA.Chemistry (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2017Article
- Emergence of native peptide sequences in prebiotic replication networks.Nature communications · 2017Article
- Structural insights into RNA duplexes with multiple 2΄-5΄-linkages.Nucleic acids research · 2017Article
- The emergence of DNA in the RNA world: an in silico simulation study of genetic takeover.BMC evolutionary biology · 2015Article
- Elucidating the molecular architecture of adaptation via evolve and resequence experiments.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2015Review
- Impact of template backbone heterogeneity on RNA polymerase II transcription.Nucleic acids research · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Multiple lines of evidence support the hypothesis that the early evolution of life was dominated by RNA, which can both transfer information from generation to generation through replication directed by base-pairing, and carry out biochemical activities by folding into functional structures. To understand how life emerged from prebiotic chemistry we must therefore explain the steps that led to the emergence of the RNA world, and in particular, the synthesis of RNA. The generation of pools of highly pure ribonucleotides on the early Earth seems unlikely, but the presence of alternative nucleotides would support the assembly of nucleic acid polymers containing nonheritable backbone heterogeneity. We suggest that homogeneous monomers might not have been necessary if populations of heterogeneous nucleic acid molecules could evolve reproducible function. For such evolution to be possible, function would have to be maintained despite the repeated scrambling of backbone chemistry from generation to generation. We have tested this possibility in a simplified model system, by using a T7 RNA polymerase variant capable of transcribing nucleic acids that contain an approximately 11 mixture of deoxy- and ribonucleotides. We readily isolated nucleotide-binding aptamers by utilizing an in vitro selection process that shuffles the order of deoxy- and ribonucleotides in each round. We describe two such RNA/DNA mosaic nucleic acid aptamers that specifically bind ATP and GTP, respectively. We conclude that nonheritable variations in nucleic acid backbone structure may not have posed an insurmountable barrier to the emergence of functionality in early nucleic acids.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.