Less can be more: RNA-adapters may enhance coding capacity of replicators.

ABSTRACT: It is still not clear how prebiotic replicators evolved towards the complexity found in present day organisms. Within the most realistic scenario for prebiotic evolution, known as the RNA world hypothesis, such complexity has arisen from replicators consisting solely of RNA. Within contemporary life, remarkably many RNAs are involved in modifying other RNAs. In hindsight, such RNA-RNA modification might have helped in alleviating the limits of complexity posed by the information threshold for RNA-only replicators. Here we study the possible role of such self-modification in early evolution, by modeling the evolution of protocells as evolving replicators, which have the opportunity to incorporate these mechanisms as a molecular tool. Evolution is studied towards a set of 25 arbitrary 'funct

SUBMITTER: de Boer FK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3264560 | biostudies-literature | 2012

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature