Life may have begun when RNA molecules began to replicate themselves, and now we’ve finally found an RNA molecule that is very close to being able to do this ...

One of the greatest mysteries of our planet is how a soup of lifeless chemicals transformed into the first living cell. There are several competing theories about where this happened, from frozen ...

These random molecules were fed a collection of three-base-long RNAs, each linked to a chemical tag. The idea was that if a molecule is capable of ligating one of these short RNA fragments to itself, ...

The discovery of catalytic RNA transformed our understanding of life's beginnings. Clare Sansom explores how the RNA world ...

While great strides have been made in exploring the world of RNA, mysteries remain—and one approach to solving them is to look at what exactly a strand of RNA is doing in a cell in real time. At a ...

AI can help protein engineers optimize the transcription enzymes used to make mRNA-based vaccines and therapeutics, say the authors of a new study.