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What Powered the Earth’s Earliest Life?
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Early biological systems likely relied on RNA molecules to copy themselves and drive simple chemical reactions. Any system that could generate guanosine‑triphosphate (GTP) — which is necessary for RNA synthesis — from prebiotic chemicals would gain a crucial advantage toward self‑replication. Now researchers from the University of California San Diego report a version of an RNA enzyme (ribozyme) that makes GTP synthesis more efficient than its predecessor.
By placing a library of about 100,000,000,000,000 mutated ribozymes into nano-droplets of water-in-oil emulsions, researchers were able to metabolically couple GTP synthesis to RNA polymerization and identify which mutations produced the most GTP. The most productive ribozymes produced about 10 times more GTP than their predecessor. This is enough to drive RNA polymerization, where separate RNA monomers are linked together into polymers – a crucial step in the development of life.
The study was published on June 9, 2026 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Authors are Xu Han, Zoe Pepper, Joshua Arriola and Ulrich Müller. Their research was funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Interdisciplinary Consortium for Astrobiology Research (ICAR 80NSSC21K0596).
Read the study in PNAS: “A GTP synthase ribozyme with increased GTP turnover.”
By placing a library of about 100,000,000,000,000 mutated ribozymes into nano-droplets of water-in-oil emulsions, researchers were able to metabolically couple GTP synthesis to RNA polymerization and identify which mutations produced the most GTP. The most productive ribozymes produced about 10 times more GTP than their predecessor. This is enough to drive RNA polymerization, where separate RNA monomers are linked together into polymers – a crucial step in the development of life.
The study was published on June 9, 2026 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Authors are Xu Han, Zoe Pepper, Joshua Arriola and Ulrich Müller. Their research was funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Interdisciplinary Consortium for Astrobiology Research (ICAR 80NSSC21K0596).
Read the study in PNAS: “A GTP synthase ribozyme with increased GTP turnover.”
By metabolically coupling a prebiotically plausible energy source a —polyphosphate — to the polymerization of RNA, this work represents an important step towards recapitulating an early RNA-dominated stage of life in the lab.
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