News
Natural recycling at the origin of life
25 Mar 2024
A new study shows how the chemical properties of RNA molecules could have facilitated the emergence of complex life.
How was complex life able to develop on the inhospitable early Earth? At the beginning there must have been ribonucleic acid (RNA) to carry the first genetic information. To build up complexity in their sequences, these biomolecules need to release water. On the early Earth, which was largely covered in seawater, that was not so easy to do. In a paper recently published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS), researchers from the team of LMU professor Dieter Braun have shown that in RNA’s struggle with the surrounding water, its natural recycling capabilities and the right ambient conditions could have been decisive.