Reading out that information and doing something with it requires proteins—and RNA.

to appreciate how it’s possible for RNA to be an enzyme, one needed to see it in three dimensions.

Remarkably, about half of all useful antibiotics target bacterial ribosomes.

to enter the cell and expelling others. Other proteins act as signaling molecules, receiving information from the outside world and activating internal processes accordingly. Still others are antibodies, which protect us from foreign invaders such as viruses. In short, proteins are spectacularly diverse.

You first mix the fatty acids that form the protocell together with the nucleic acid, then let the mixture dry out and rehydrate it or else subject it to freeze-thaw cycles, and nucleic acid is randomly encapsulated.

So now RNA had been found at the heart of yet another critical life process—building out chromosome ends to secure the integrity of the genome.

the reaction conditions needed to make the U and C bricks were quite different from the conditions needed to make the A and G bricks, and the two sets of conditions were largely incompatible.

there was a single base-pair mutation in the same position. It was not in the coding region of the gene, where everyone else had been looking, but rather in the part of the gene called the “promoter”—because this part promotes transcription of the DNA into mRNA.

interference (RNAi).