Self-sustained Replication of an RNA Enzyme

By T. A. Lincoln, G. F. Joyce. Science, 2009

610 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An RNA enzyme that catalyzes the RNA-templated joining of RNA was converted to a format whereby two enzymes catalyze each other's synthesis from a total of four oligonucleotide substrates. These cross-replicating RNA enzymes undergo self-sustained exponential amplification in the absence of proteins or other biological materials. Amplification occurs with a doubling time of about 1 hour and can be continued indefinitely. Populations of various cross-replicating enzymes were constructed and allowed to compete for a common pool of substrates, during which recombinant replicators arose and grew to dominate the population. These replicating RNA enzymes can serve as an experimental model of a genetic system. Many such model systems could be constructed, allowing different selective outcomes to be related to the underlying properties of the genetic system.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Genetics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7aeff6be73f513c54e14d4aa033f4d0ae287ff33

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Citations in the corpus

Welcome Home, Systems Chemists! (2010, background): “While autocatalytic and cross-catalytic replication networks of short nucleic acids are known for some time [56], similar enzyme-free replication of long RNA molecules with the capacity for folding and catalysis became possible only recently [57,58].”
Toward a general theory of evolution: Extending Darwinian theory to inanimate matter (2011, background): “The striking aspect of Voytek and Joyce's study was that it demonstrated that the roots of this quintessential biological principle can be found in chemistry.”
Shifts in growth strategies reflect tradeoffs in cellular economics (2009, background): “The simplest self replicating system, or self-replicator as we will call it, consists of one catalyst, a kind of ribosome, synthesizing itself from a precursor ( Figure 2 and se”
The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution (2011, background): “, 2001); initially, the ribozymes with this activity could function only by specific base-pairing to the template, but subsequently general ribozyme polymerases of this class have been evolved through additional selection (Lincoln and Joyce, 2009).”