Physics News

On Earth, all life is dependent upon the nucleic acids, DNA and RNA. But researchers Including those who are wondering how to detect life somewhere other than Earth, have wondered whether other information-bearing polymers might also serve this purpose. Is there something special about DNA and RNA, or did they just happen to be the first things that work? The answer to that question would not only have implications for the origin of life on Earth and elsewhere, but it might have practical implications. Researchers have now taken a major step towards showing that alternatives can actually work as genetic material. They replaced a standard part of nucleic acids with a number of chemical relatives, and found out that they all could work. Sequence information could be shuttled back and forth between these artificial molecules and DNA, and the synthetic materials could even undergo the sort of molecular evolution that has been demonstrated using DNA and RNA. Read the comments on this post