A team from the University of Illinois has uncovered surprising evolutionary links between the genetic code and tiny protein fragments called dipeptides. By analyzing billions of dipeptide sequences ...

Researchers demonstrated how amino acids could spontaneously attach to RNA under early Earth-like conditions using thioesters, providing a long-sought clue to the origins of protein synthesis. This ...

Chemists at UCL have shown how two of biology’s most fundamental ingredients, RNA (ribonucleic acid) and amino acids, could have spontaneously joined together at the origin of life four billion years ...

Genes are the building blocks of life, and the genetic code provides the instructions for the complex processes that make organisms function. But how and why did it come to be the way it is? A recent ...

The emergence of the first biopolymers and their building blocks on the early Earth is considered a key moment in the origin of life (OoL), but how life began on the prebiotic Earth from a pile of ...

John M. Archibald is in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4H7, Canada, and also at the Institute for Comparative Genomics, Dalhousie ...

Chemists at University College London have shown how two of biology's most fundamental ingredients, RNA (ribonucleic acid) and amino acids, could have spontaneously joined together at the origin of ...