Molecular alternatives to DNA, RNA offer new insight into life’s origins
![John Chaput - John Chaput, a researcher in the Biodeisgn Institute's Center for Evolutionary Medicine and Informatics. Photo by: The Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University](https://asunews.asu.edu/files/imagecache/story_main_image/3008450227_400f18dc79_b_0.jpg)
A long-debated question is whether heredity and evolution could be performed by molecules other than DNA and RNA.
John Chaput, a researcher at ASU’s Biodesign Institute, who recently published an article in Nature Chemistry describing the evolution of threose nucleic acids, joined a multidisciplinary team of scientists from England, Belgium and Denmark to extend these properties to other so-called Xenonucleic acids or XNAs.
The group demonstrates for the first time that six of these unnatural nucleic acid polymers are capable of sharing information with DNA. One of these XNAs, a molecule referred to as anhydrohexitol nucleic acid or HNA was capable of undergoing directed evolution and folding into biologically useful forms.
Their results appear in the current issue of Science
Read more at ASU News