Origin of Life: Pie in the sky research (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, October 30, 2014, 14:52 (3459 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

A lab has found an RNAzyme that can make left-handed RNA, using a start of a quadrllion possibilities, and guided it from there. This is intelligent design par excellance, and they propose it happened naturally!-http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141029141216.htm-"He started with a soup of about a quadrillion (1015) short RNA molecules. Their sequences were essentially random, and all were of right-handed chirality. "We set it up so that the molecules that could catalyze a joining reaction with left-handed RNA could be pulled out of solution and then amplified," Sczepanski said.
 
"After just 10 of these selection-and-amplification rounds, the researchers had a strong candidate ribozyme. They then expanded the size of its core region, put it through six more selection rounds and trimmed the extraneous nucleotides. The result: an 83-nucleotide ribozyme that was only moderately sequence-specific and could reliably knit a test segment of left-handed RNA to a template -- about a million times faster than would have happened without enzyme assistance."