The origin of life is commonly discussed within two competing conceptual frameworks: the metabolism-first and information-first hypotheses. While each emphasizes a different defining property of early life, modern biochemistry reveals […]
The central dogma of molecular biology describes how genetic information stored in nucleic acids guides the formation of structured proteins from a single molecular alphabet of twenty amino acids (C20)1,2.
Chemists at UCL and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology have demonstrated how RNA (ribonucleic acid) might have replicated itself on early Earth – a key process in the origin […]
A new study led by researchers from the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the Institute of Science Tokyo, in collaboration with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Weizmann Institute […]
Many cofactors share a molecular structure – adenosine – that otherwise occurs in nucleic acids. The presence of adenosine in cofactors has presented an evolutionary puzzle.
Life on Earth uses DNA as the central template for self-replication, genetic encoding, and information transfer.
Scientists have uncovered new insights into the protoribosome, a molecular fossil within the ribosome, which plays a key role in the origin of life on Earth. This research, published in […]
Nucleic acid replication is a central process at the origin of life. On early Earth, replication is challenged by the dilution of molecular building blocks and the difficulty of separating […]
