Anti-ribosome

When it comes to evolution, most scientists agree on the basic driving mechanisms of natural selection and random mutations. However, once we start looking further back in the past, controversies arise. At an early point in evolution, a transition occurred from the primeval “soup” of small molecules present in early Earth’s oceans and atmosphere to cells containing macromolecules (DNA, RNA, proteins). One of the dominant theories is that RNA was the first to arise, and that the so-called “RNA world” preceded the DNA-RNA-protein world that exists today. In this project we propose to test an alternative hypothesis: that small catalytic proteins were first, and that their sequence information was written down in the first DNA genomes by a multi-molecular assembly which we call the anti-ribosome. In our hypothesis, the RNA plays a mediator role between protein and DNA, very similar to its role in all extant cells. Our aim is to reconstruct the anti-ribosome from molecular remnants and show that it can work.