ArticleJournal of molecular evolution2013
The paradox of dual roles in the RNA world: resolving the conflict between stable folding and templating ability.
Article in Journal of molecular evolution, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 44 citations in OpenAlex.
- Generalizing the central dogma as a cross-hierarchical principle of biology.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- The power of triplets.Nature reviews. Chemistry · 2025Article
- Trinucleotide substrates under pH-freeze-thaw cycles enable open-ended exponential RNA replication by a polymerase ribozyme.Nature chemistry · 2025Article
- Which came first: the chicken, the egg, or guanine?RNA (New York, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- The Ring World: Eversion of Small Double-Stranded Polynucleotide Circlets at the Origin of DNA Double Helix, RNA Polymerization, Triplet Code, Twenty Amino Acids, and Strand Asymmetry.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
- Template-Free Assembly of Functional RNAs by Loop-Closing Ligation.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2022Article
- A scaling law of multilevel evolution: how the balance between within- and among-collective evolution is determined.Genetics · 2022Article
- Can artificial neural replicators be useful for studying RNA replicators?Archives of virology · 2020Article
- On the emergence of structural complexity in RNA replicators.RNA (New York, N.Y.) · 2019Article
- The origin of the central dogma through conflicting multilevel selection.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Solvent viscosity facilitates replication and ribozyme catalysis from an RNA duplex in a model prebiotic process.Nucleic acids research · 2019Article
- Article
- In the Beginning was a Mutualism - On the Origin of Translation.Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life · 2018Article
- Evolutionary Conflict Leads to Innovation: Symmetry Breaking in a Spatial Model of RNA-Like Replicators.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2017Article
- The origin of a primordial genome through spontaneous symmetry breaking.Nature communications · 2017Article
- Cas6 processes tight and relaxed repeat RNA via multiple mechanisms: A hypothesis.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2017Review
- The Conservation and Function of RNA Secondary Structure in Plants.Annual review of plant biology · 2016Review
- Viroids: "living fossils" of primordial RNAs?Biology direct · 2016Article
- Thiosulfate-Hydrogen Peroxide Redox Oscillator as pH Driver for Ribozyme Activity in the RNA World.Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life · 2016Article
- In silico discovery and modeling of non-coding RNA structure in viruses.Methods (San Diego, Calif.) · 2015Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
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Abstract
The hypothesized dual roles of RNA as both information carrier and biocatalyst during the earliest stages of life require a combination of features: good templating ability (for replication) and stable folding (for ribozymes). However, this poses the following paradox: well-folded sequences are poor templates for copying, but poorly folded sequences are unlikely to be good ribozymes. Here, we describe a strategy to overcome this dilemma through G:U wobble pairing in RNA. Unlike Watson-Crick base pairs, wobble pairs contribute highly to the energetic stability of the folded structure of their sequence, but only slightly, if at all, to the stability of the folded reverse complement. Sequences in the RNA World might thereby combine stable folding of the ribozyme with an unstructured, reverse-complementary genome, resulting in a "division of labor" between the strands. We demonstrate this strategy using computational simulations of RNA folding and an experimental model of early replication, nonenzymatic template-directed RNA primer extension. Additional study is needed to solve other problems associated with a complete replication cycle, including separation of strands after copying. Interestingly, viroid RNA sequences, which have been suggested to be relics of an RNA World (Diener, Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 86:9370-9374, 1989), also show significant asymmetry in folding energy between the infectious (+) and template (-) strands due to G:U pairing, suggesting that this strategy may even be used by replicators in the present day.
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Registered trials
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.