Researchers have shown that RNA molecules can grow peptides all by themselves—no ribosome required—which may have helped kick-start life on Earth.
. But to give rise to modern life, RNA would have had to somehow “learn” to make proteins, and eventually ribosomes. “At the moment, the ribosome simply falls from the heavens,” says Thomas Carell, a chemist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Carell and his colleagues noticed that some of these noncanonical RNAs could have been synthesized from simple molecules on early Earth. They and others went on to show that some noncanonical bases could bind to amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, raising the possibility they could also link them together into peptides.
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