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Researchers have discovered a plausible evolutionary setting in which nucleic acids—the fundamental genetic building blocks of life—could enable their own replication, possibly leading to life on Earth.

The study, published today as a Reviewed Preprint in eLife, was described by editors as important work with convincing evidence to show how a simple geophysical setting of gas flow over a narrow channel of water can create a physical environment that leads to the replication of nucleic acids. The work will be of interest to scientists working on the origin of life, and more broadly, on nucleic acids and diagnostic applications.

The emergence of life on Earth is still an unsolved puzzle, but a common theory is that replication of genetic material—the nucleic acids DNA and RNA—was a central and critical process. RNA molecules can store genetic information and catalyze their own replication through forming double-stranded helices. The combination of these abilities allows them to mutate, evolve and adapt to diverse environments and ultimately encode the protein building blocks of life.

For this to happen, strands of RNA need not only to replicate into a double-stranded form, but also to separate again to complete the replication cycle. Strand separation, however, is a difficult task at the high salt and nucleic acid concentrations required for replication.

"Various mechanisms have been studied for their potential to separate DNA strands at the origin of life, but they all require temperature changes that would lead to degradation of nucleic acids," says lead author Philipp Schwintek, a Ph.D. student in Systems Biophysics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany.

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