Various steps in the RNA world required cooperation. Why did life’s first inhabitants, from polymerases to synthetases, cooperate? We develop kin selection models of the RNA world to answer these questions. We develop a very simple model of RNA coope...
How functional peptides may have arisen is a significant problem for the scenario of the RNA world. An attractive idea, the direct RNA template (DRT) hypothesis, proposes that RNA molecules can bind amino acids specifically and promote the synthesis...
The RNA world hypothesis states that during an early stage of life, RNA molecules functioned as genome and as the only genome-encoded catalyst. This hypothesis is supported by several lines of evidence, one of which is the in vitro selection of catal...
During the evolution of the RNA World, compartments, which were fragments of space surrounded by a primitive lipid membrane, had to have emerged. These led eventually to the formation of modern cellular membranes. Inside these compartments, another p...
The basic idea of the RNA world as an early step towards life relies on a molecular evolution process based on self-replicating RNA strands. It is probably the oldest and most convincing model for efficient prebiotic evolution. Obviously, the functio...
The “RNA world” hypothesis is seen as one of the main contenders for a viable theory on the origin of life. Relatively small RNAs have catalytic power, RNA is everywhere in present-day life, the ribosome is seen as a ribozyme, and rRNA and tRNA are c...
The current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic underscores the importance of understanding the evolution of RNA genomes. While RNA is subject to the formation of similar lesions as DNA, the evolutionary and physiological impacts RNA lesions have on viral genomes ar...
The origin of life remains one of the major scientific questions in modern biology. Among many hypotheses aiming to explain how life on Earth started, RNA world is probably the most extensively studied. It assumes that, in the very beginning, RNA mol...
The rolling circle mechanism found in viroids and some RNA viruses is a likely way that replication could have begun in the RNA World. Here, we consider simulations of populations of protocells, each containing multiple copies of rolling circle RNAs...
As of today, the most credible scientific paradigm pertaining to the origin of life on Earth is undoubtedly the RNA World scenario. It is built on the assumption that catalytically active replicators (most probably RNA-like macromolecules) may have b...
Traditional prebiotic chemistry experiments often isolated single reactions under clean, controlled conditions, yet early Earth was chemically diverse and physically dynamic. Such primordial complexity likely imposed obstacles, including side reactio...
Information is the currency of life, but the origin of prebiotic information remains a mystery. We propose transitional pathways from the cosmic building blocks of life to the complex prebiotic organic chemistry that led to the origin of information...
RNA played a central role in the emergence of the first life-like system on primitive Earth since RNA molecules contain both genetic information and catalytic activity. However, there are several drawbacks regarding the RNA world hypothesis. Here, I...
Herein we present the tRNA core hypothesis, which emphasizes the central role of tRNAs molecules in the origin and evolution of fundamental biological processes. tRNAs gave origin to the first genes (mRNA) and the peptidyl transferase center (rRNA),...
The RNA World is now some four billion years behind us, but only recently turned 50 as a human hypothesis. [...]
Corresponding to life’s two distinct aspects: Darwinian evolution and self-sustainment, the origin of life should also split into two issues: the origin of Darwinian evolution and the arising of self-sustainment. Because the “self-sustainment” we con...
The R3C ligase ribozyme is an artificial ligase ribozyme produced by modification of the ribozyme that lacks cytidine. Here, we attempted to modify the original R3C ribozyme (73 nucleotides) by reducing the number of nucleotides while maintaining the...
The ubiquitous, evolutionarily oldest RNAs and proteins exclusively use rather rare zinc as transition metal cofactor and potassium as alkali metal cofactor, which implies their abundance in the habitats of the first organisms. Intriguingly, lunar ro...
Seed longevity is a crucial trait for the seed industry and genetic resource preservation. To develop excellent cultivars with extended seed lifespans, it is important to understand the mechanism of keeping seed germinability long term and to find us...
Comirnaty (BNT162b2) and Spikevax (mRNA-1273) COVID-19 vaccines encode a full-length SARS-CoV-2 Spike (S) protein. To evaluate whether the S-protein expressed following treatment with the two vaccines differs in the real-world context, two cell lines...
RNA-dependent RNA polymerases (RDRs) are key players in the antiviral defence mediated by RNA silencing in plants. RDR6 is one of the major components of the process, regulating the infection of certain RNA viruses. To better clarify its function aga...
How could modern life have evolved? The answer to that question still remains unclear. However, evidence is growing that, since the origin of life, RNA could have played an important role throughout evolution, right up to the development of complex o...
One of the most intriguing questions in biological science is how life originated on Earth. A large number of hypotheses have been proposed to explain it, each putting an emphasis on different events leading to functional translation and self-sustain...
The link between non-enzymatic RNA polymerization and RNA self-replication is a key step towards the “RNA world” and still far from being solved, despite extensive research. Clay minerals, lipids and, more recently, peptides were found to catalyze th...
The RNA World Hypothesis posits that the first self-replicating molecules were RNAs. RNA self-replicases are, in general, assumed to have employed nucleotide 5ʹ-polyphosphates (or their analogues) as substrates for RNA polymerization. The mechanism...
To track down the possible roots of life, various models for the initial living system composed of different combinations of the three extant biopolymers, RNA, DNA, and proteins, are presented. The suitability of each molecular set is assessed accord...
During the evolution of the RNA, short RNAs are thought to have joined together to form long RNAs, enhancing their function as ribozymes. Previously, the artificial R3C ligase ribozyme (73 nucleotides) was successfully reduced to 46 nucleotides; howe...
The origins of the components of genetic coding are examined in the present study. Genetic information arose from replicator induction by metabolite in accordance with the metabolic expansion law. Messenger RNA and transfer RNA stemmed from a templat...
RNA non-enzymatic recombination reactions are of great interest within the hypothesis of the "RNA world", which argues that at some stage of prebiotic life development proteins were not yet engaged in biochemical reactions and RNA carried out both th...
A central question in the evolution of the modern translation machinery is the origin and chemical ethology of the amino acids prescribed by the genetic code. The RNA World hypothesis postulates that templated protein synthesis has emerged in the tra...
The notion of RNA-based therapeutics has gained wide attractions in both academic and commercial institutions. RNA is a polymer of nucleic acids that has been proven to be impressively versatile, dating to its hypothesized RNA World origins, evidence...
Current cellular facts allow us to follow the link from chemical to biochemical metabolites, from the ancient to the modern world. In this context, the “RNA world” hypothesis proposes that early in the evolution of life, the ribozyme was...
We review arguments that biology emerged from a reciprocal partnership in which small ancestral oligopeptides and oligonucleotides initially both contributed rudimentary information coding and catalytic rate accelerations, and that the superior infor...
Micro-RNA (miRNA or miR) regulates at least 60% of the genes in the human genome through their target sites at mRNA 3’-untranslated regions (UTR), and defects in miRNA expression regulation and target sites are frequently observed in cancers. We repo...
Most contemporary theories for the chemical origins of life include the prebiotic synthesis of informational polymers, including strong interpretations of the RNA World hypothesis. Existing challenges to the prebiotic emergence of RNA have encouraged...
Cellular life is based on interacting polymer networks that serve as catalysts, genetic information and structural molecules. The complexity of the DNA, RNA and protein biochemistry suggests that it must have been preceded by simpler systems. The RNA...
The formation, growth, division and proliferation of protocells containing RNA strands is an important step in ensuring the viability of a mixed RNA–lipid world. Experiments and computer simulations indicate that RNA encapsulated inside protoce...
It is not entirely clear why, at some stage in its evolution, terrestrial life adopted double-stranded DNA as the hereditary material. To explain this, we propose that small, double-stranded, polynucleotide circlets have special catalytic properties....
In addition to being one of the proponents of the “Lipid World hypothesis”, David Deamer, together with other colleagues, pioneered studies involving formation of RNA-like oligomers from their ‘non-activated’, prebiotically pl...
Background/Objectives: Co-testing may improve cervical cancer prevention by stratifying women into groups with different absolute risks of CIN2+, CIN3+, and cervical cancer. We evaluated real-world co-testing with cervical cytology and a genotype-spe...
We report a prebiotically relevant solution to the N1-ribosylation of pyrimidine nucleobases, a well-known challenge to the RNA world hypothesis. We found that the presence of metal cations and clay minerals enable the previously unachievable direct...
The origin of life might be sparked by the polymerization of the first RNA molecules in Darwinian ponds during wet-dry cycles. The key life-building block ribose was found in carbonaceous chondrites. Its exogenous delivery onto the Hadean Earth could...
The mRNA-1273 Moderna COVID-19 vaccine was introduced to combat the COVID-19 global pandemic in 2020. Although the safety of the vaccine has been investigated worldwide, real-world safety data is scarce in Japan. An online, real-time survey of advers...
There are several theories on the origin of life, which differ by choosing the preponderant factor of emergence: main function (autocatalysis versus replication), initial location (black smokers versus ponds) or first molecule (RNA versus DNA). Among...
Psychrophiles thrive permanently in the various cold environments on Earth. Their unsuspected ability to remain metabolically active in the most extreme low temperature conditions provides insights into a possible cold step in the origin of life. Mor...
In RNA-World scenarios for the origin of life, replication is catalyzed by polymerase ribozymes. Replicating RNA systems are subject to invasion by non-functional parasitic strands. It is well-known that there are two ways to avoid the destruction of...
The RNA world hypothesis suggests that chemical networks consisting of functional RNA molecules could have constructed a primitive life-like system leading a first living system. The chemical evolution scenario of RNA molecules should be consistent w...
An indispensable prerequisite for establishing a scenario of life emerging by natural processes is the requirement that the first simple proto-molecules could have had a realistic probability of self-assembly from random molecular polymers in the pre...
Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs), circular RNAs (circRNAs), micro RNAs (miRNAs), and extracellular RNAs (exRNAs) are new groups of RNAs with regulation activities that have low or no protein-coding ability. Emerging evidence suggests that deregulated e...
Implicit in the RNA world hypothesis is that prebiotic RNA synthesis, despite occurring in an environment without biochemical catalysts, produced the long RNA polymers which are essential to the formation of life. In order to investigate the prebioti...
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