Effect of stalling after mismatches on the error catastrophe in nonenzymatic nucleic acid replication.

ABSTRACT: The frequency of errors during genome replication limits the amount of functionally important information that can be passed on from generation to generation. During the origin of life, mutation rates are thought to have been quite high, raising a classic chicken-and-egg paradox: could nonenzymatic replication propagate sequences accurately enough to allow for the emergence of heritable function? Here we show that the theoretical limit on genomic information content may increase substantially as a consequence of dramatically slowed polymerization after mismatches. As a result of postmismatch stalling, accurate copies of a template tend to be completed more rapidly than mutant copies and the accurate copies can therefore begin a second round of replication more quickly. To quantify this eff

SUBMITTER: Rajamani S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2857888 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature