New insight into life’s origins

Molecular alternatives to DNA, RNA offer new insight into life’s origins

Posted: April 19, 2012 at ASU News

Living systems owe their existence to a pair of information-carrying molecules: DNA and RNA. These fundamental chemical forms possess two features essential for life: they display heredity – meaning they can encode and pass on genetic information, and they can adapt over time, through processes of Darwinian evolution.

A long-debated question is whether heredity and evolution could be performed by molecules other than DNA and RNA.

John Chaput, a researcher at ASU’s Biodesign Institute, who recently published an article in Nature Chemistry describing the evolution of threose nucleic acids, joined a multidisciplinary team of scientists from England, Belgium and Denmark to extend these properties to other so-called Xenonucleic acids or XNAs.

The group demonstrates for the first time that six of these unnatural nucleic acid polymers are capable of sharing information with DNA. One of these XNAs, a molecule referred to as anhydrohexitol nucleic acid or HNA was capable of undergoing directed evolution and folding into biologically useful forms.

Their results appear in the current issue of Science

Read more at ASU News

https://asunews.asu.edu/20120419_xna

Posted in AZBio News.