Origin-of-Life Study Points to Chemical Chimeras, Not RNA

research is beginning to show that starting with the right kind of mess is not only more realistic, but more effective at generating the materials vital to life, while also doing away with problems that have plagued purer systems. “There are times when we have mixtures, rather than just the isolated reactants that people typically use, and we get better results”. When mixtures are taken into consideration, the emergence of life on Earth in some ways “is not as hard as we might think it is.” What if the chimeric instability was, instead, secretly beneficial and offered a more natural way to get to a world of pure RNA and pure DNA right out of the gate?

Because the nucleic acids with mixed backbones formed weaker 2-strand systems, they didn’t succumb to the strand separation problem that prevented replication for pure RNA. Moreover, during their replication process, the RNA-DNA chimeras preferentially synthesized strands of pure RNA and pure DNA rather than new chimeric molecules — and they produced more of those pure compounds than pure nucleic acid templates did.

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