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Limited Sequence Diversity Within A Population Supports Prebiotic Rna Reproduction, Ryo Mizuuchi, Niles Lehman

Chemistry Faculty Publications and Presentations

The origins of life require the emergence of informational polymers capable of reproduction. In the RNA world on the primordial Earth, reproducible RNA molecules would have arisen from a mixture of compositionally biased, poorly available, short RNA sequences in prebiotic environments. However, it remains unclear what level of sequence diversity within a small subset of population is required to initiate RNA reproduction by prebiotic mechanisms. Here, using a simulation for template-directed recombination and ligation, we explore the effect of sequence diversity in a given population for the onset of RNA reproduction. We show that RNA reproduction is improbable in low …