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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Group I Intron Internal Guide Sequence Binding Strength As A Component Of Ribozyme Network Formation, Elizabeth Satterwhite, Jessica Anne Mellor Yeates, Niles Lehman
Group I Intron Internal Guide Sequence Binding Strength As A Component Of Ribozyme Network Formation, Elizabeth Satterwhite, Jessica Anne Mellor Yeates, Niles Lehman
Chemistry Faculty Publications and Presentations
Origins-of-life research requires searching for a plausible transition from simple chemicals to larger macromolecules that can both hold information and catalyze their own production. We have previously shown that some group I intron ribozymes possess the ability to help synthesize other ribozyme genotypes by recombination reactions in small networks in an autocatalytic fashion. By simplifying these recombination reactions, using fluorescent anisotropy, we quantified the thermodynamic binding strength between two nucleotides of two group I intron RNA fragments for all 16 possible genotype combinations. We provide evidence that the binding strength (KD) between the 3-nucleotide internal guide sequence …
The Foundations Of Network Dynamics In An Rna Recombinase System, Jessica Anne Mellor Yeates
The Foundations Of Network Dynamics In An Rna Recombinase System, Jessica Anne Mellor Yeates
Dissertations and Theses
How life originated from physical and chemical processes is one of the great questions still unanswered today. Studies towards this effort have transitioned from the notion of a single self-replicating entity to the idea that a network of interacting molecules made this initial biological leap. In order to understand the chemical kinetic and thermodynamic mechanisms that could engender pre-life type networks we present an empirical characterization of a network of RNA recombinase molecules. We begin with 1-, 2-, and 3-molecular ensembles and provide a game theoretic analysis to describe the frequency dependent dynamics of competing and cooperating RNA genotypes. This …