A few years ago, Celia Blanco and Sam Verbanic began analyzing Illumina data from our collaborator Burckhard Seelig’s laboratory. Since our existing tools were written for ribozyme selections, Celia and Sam wrote some new scripts to pre-process the data. Others...
Looking for a quick introduction to protocells and their importance for the origin of life? Read our Primer by postdoctoral fellow Yei-Chen Lai and Irene Chen, and take advantage of the opportunity to enjoy some of J.R.R. Tolkien’s lyrical text. We’ll bet...
It is tempting to imagine that, during the origin of life, the earliest catalytic RNAs would be so simple that they would be rather non-specific in activity or substrates. Then, evolution might create variants that would become optimized for different activities...
RNA is widely agreed to be an early, if not the earliest, molecular basis for life. However, conditions on the early Earth were not terribly hospitable. While high-energy photons are important for prebiotic synthesis, they also damage nucleic acids. Postdoctoral...
