Theoretical scenario for prebiotic polymers capable of nonenzymatic replication to acquire an early catalytic function, specifically cleavage activity.

All steps of a viroid-like replication cycle can be catalyzed by RNA alone.

Rudimentary cross-catalytic replication can be established by double-hairpins of tRNA-like sequences, implying that replication and translation could have emerged along a common evolutionary trajectory.

Polymerase θ is among the most proficient terminal transferases known and switches between three different mechanisms of terminal transferase activity.

SeqZip is a new DNA ligation-based method to condense and maintain exon connectivity information within individual RNA molecules, which can provide new insights into alternative splicing.

Adopting RNA trinucleotides as substrates, ribozymes can catalyse the copying of structured RNA sequences, allowing self-synthesis by part of a newly evolved symbiotic ribozyme pair.

The details of how the enzyme DNA polymerase α initiates the polymerization of nucleotides in DNA replication, a critical step in the synthesis of new chromosomal DNA, have been revealed in atomic detail.

Escherichia coli is surprisingly tolerant to chromatinization by archaeal histones, suggesting that histones can become established as ubiquitous chromatin proteins without interfering critically with some key DNA-templated processes.

To protect mammals against retroviral infections, TRIM5 restriction factors recognize viral capsids by forming complementary hexagonal nets that can adapt to the patterns of capsid protein subunits on the viral capsid surface.

An individual-based model framework of sub-exponentially growing replicator systems suggests that parabolic dynamics could have been able to maintain genetic diversity and circumvent the error threshold problem during early evolution.