Sprecher
Beschreibung
Over the past few centuries, biologists have revealed an exhaustive list of the molecular components of life and their interactions. So, why can’t we synthesize life from scratch? A critical challenge in understanding the synthesis and origin of life is to understand how bioactivity could be regulated in prebiotic environments. We are studying how Lipid membranes can serve as organizational platforms for riboregulation in prebiotically plausible synthetic systems. RNA can serve as both catalyst and information carrier, giving it central importance in the origin and synthesis of life. We recently demonstrated that RNA can interact directly with lipids in a sequence-dependent manner, and that this changes ribozyme activity (Czerniak and Saenz, 2022). Our observations demonstrate a functional interaction between RNA and lipids and gives a simple answer to a fundamental question surrounding the origin of life – how could primordial RNA molecules be regulated?
Reference:
Czerniak T, Saenz JP. 2022. Lipid membranes modulate the activity of RNA through sequence-dependent interactions. P Natl Acad Sci Usa 119:e2119235119. doi:10.1073/pnas.2119235119
