Special Seminar - Directed evolution of RNA for self-replication

How did life begin from chemistry? One leading idea is that RNA played a central role because it can act both as genetic material and as a catalyst. A major challenge has been that known RNA polymerase ribozymes, the catalysts of RNA copying, are large and complex, making them difficult to copy and unlikely to arise from prebiotic RNA sequence pools.

In this seminar, Edoardo Gianni will present QT45, a compact 45-nucleotide RNA polymerase ribozyme discovered from random RNA sequence pools. QT45 can catalyse the two essential reactions required for RNA self-replication: the synthesis of itself and the synthesis of its complementary strand. This work suggests that RNA-copying activity may be more common in sequence space than previously thought. It also brings us closer to understanding how self-replicating molecular systems could emerge in nature and be reconstructed in the laboratory.

Please join us for a fascinating seminar at the interface of origin-of-life chemistry, RNA biology, and synthetic molecular systems.

Let me know if you would like to meet Edo during the day.