New Twist Found in the Story of Life’s Start

Joyce, now at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and Jonathan Sczepanski, a postdoctoral researcher, created an RNA enzyme — a substance that copies RNA — that can function in a soup of left- and right-handed building blocks, providing a potential mechanism for how some of the first biological molecules might have evolved in a symmetrical world. Around the same time, scientists were trying to figure out how the building blocks of life — amino acids and nucleic acids — could have spontaneously formed into more complex molecules such as proteins, DNA and RNA. In the decades since Joyce’s 1984 experiment, scientists have proposed myriad ways around the problem, from physical and chemical theories to RNA precursors that lack chirality.

Source: www.quantamagazine.org