ArticleNature communications2020
Mutually stabilizing interactions between proto-peptides and RNA.
Article in Nature communications, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 57 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
57 citing papers in PubMed, 117 citations in OpenAlex.
- Functional abiotic metabolite assembly hypothesis for the early events in the origin of life.Nature communications · 2026Review
- Review
- The RNA-First Fallacy: Conflating Evolutionary Ancestry with Prebiotic Primacy.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Complex and Messy Prebiotic Chemistry: Obstacles and Opportunities for an RNA World.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- A symbiotic origin of the ribosome?PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Selection for Molecularly Complementary Modules (MCMs) Drives the Origins and Evolution of Pleiofunctional, Epistatic Interactomes (PEIs).Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Specificity of the stabilizing interaction between intrinsically disordered protein sequences and G-quadruplexes in RNA.Nucleic acids research · 2026Article
- Molecular war and peace: the concurrent path to antibiosis and antibiotic resistance.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Review
- Protopeptide backbone affects assembly in aqueous solutions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- RNA-peptide interactions tune the ribozyme activity within coacervate microdroplet dispersions.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Amino acids catalyse RNA formation under ambient alkaline conditions.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Role of Electron Spin, Chirality, and Charge Dynamics in Promoting the Persistence of Nascent Nucleic Acid-Peptide Complexes.The journal of physical chemistry. B · 2025Article
- Prebiotic Peptide Synthesis: How Did Longest Peptide Appear?Journal of molecular evolution · 2025Review
- Evolution of complex chemical mixtures reveals combinatorial compression and population synchronicity.Nature chemistry · 2025Article
- Biological Polymers: Evolution, Function, and Significance.Accounts of chemical research · 2025Article
- Probing the Limits of Reactant Concentration and Volume in Primitive Polyphenyllactate Synthesis and Microdroplet Assembly Processes.ACS bio & med chem Au · 2025Article
- Intellectual frameworks to understand complex biochemical systems at the origin of life.Nature chemistry · 2025Article
- How biophysics shapes the origins of life: a 21st IUPAB/62nd BSJ joint congress symposium overview.Biophysical reviews · 2024Article
- The prebiotic emergence of biological evolution.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Amino acid analogues provide multiple plausible pathways to prebiotic peptides.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The close synergy between peptides and nucleic acids in current biology is suggestive of a functional co-evolution between the two polymers. Here we show that cationic proto-peptides (depsipeptides and polyesters), either produced as mixtures from plausibly prebiotic dry-down reactions or synthetically prepared in pure form, can engage in direct interactions with RNA resulting in mutual stabilization. Cationic proto-peptides significantly increase the thermal stability of folded RNA structures. In turn, RNA increases the lifetime of a depsipeptide by >30-fold. Proto-peptides containing the proteinaceous amino acids Lys, Arg, or His adjacent to backbone ester bonds generally promote RNA duplex thermal stability to a greater magnitude than do analogous sequences containing non-proteinaceous residues. Our findings support a model in which tightly-intertwined biological dependencies of RNA and protein reflect a long co-evolutionary history that began with rudimentary, mutually-stabilizing interactions at early stages of polypeptide and nucleic acid co-existence.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.