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04 October 2019

Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

The chemical feat strengthens theory that the first life on Earth was based on RNA.

Davide Castelvecchi

Davide Castelvecchi
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If Thomas Carell is right, around 4 billion years ago, much of Earth might have been blanketed with a greyish-brown kind of mineral. This was no ordinary rock, however: it consisted of crystals of the organic molecules that scientists now call A, U, C and G. And some of these, the theory goes, would later serve as the building blocks of RNA, the evolutionary engine of the first living organisms, before DNA existed.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02622-4

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