Battleangel

Medical News Today - An investigation led by Mauro Santos, from the Department of Genetics and Microbiology at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (Spain), alongside two Hungarian scientists, has shown that the error threshold, that is, the maximum number of errors that may occur during the replication process of ribozymes without this affecting its functioning, is higher than was previously calculated.

In practice, this means that the first riboorganisms (protocells in which RNA is responsible for genetic information and metabolic reactions) could have a much bigger genome than was previously thought: they could contain more than 100 different genes, each measuring 70 bases in length (bases are the units that constitute the genes and codify the information), or more than 70 genes, each measuring 100 bases. It is worth remembering that tRNAs (essential molecules for the synthesis of proteins) are approximately 70 bases long.