How did nucleic acids come to exist?

The bases in modern nucleic acids don't combine with ribose under the same conditions. “We think we can consider these bases to be very plausibly prebiotic,” Hud says. “They're doing things that look like they could get us on the road to making an RNA-like molecule. read more

However, despite its central role, surprisingly little is understood about where RNA actually came from. No studies to date have succeeded in generating RNA in a one-pot reaction from simpler starting materials, although this does not mean that simpler nucleic acids did not exist before RNA. read more

Nucleic acids are the key information-carrying molecules of the cell, and, by leading the process of protein synthesis, they determine the inherited characteristics of every living thing. Its two main classes are deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA). read more