The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life's Deepest Secrets

The carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen found in each nucleotide would come from simple atmospheric gases such as hydrogen cyanide, which contains all three of these elements.

Scientists discovered a suite of previously undetected

long before CRISPR, scientists had found that they could easily trick homologous recombination by introducing‡ a donor template DNA that matched the sequences near where a break had occurred but included a patch of nonmatching DNA farther away.

positively charged magnesium ions, which are normal constituents of living cells, positioned themselves to solve the charge-repulsion problem of folding a highly negatively charged RNA.

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”

The small subunit

Hydrogen cyanide is thought to have been abundant in the atmosphere of the young Earth,

RNA molecules are not transcribed from DNA in their final active form. Instead, they undergo processing before they are put to work.

In prebiotic times—that is, before the emergence of the first life-form—the bricks would have to form spontaneously from chemicals present in the environment.