"The biochemical roots of the RNA World Hypothesis" seminar run by StaPa

The Institut Pasteur's association for young researchers, StaPa, is running a seminar entitled "The biochemical roots of the RNA World Hypothesis".

This event will take place on June 27, at 2:00pm, in amphitheatre Emile Duclaux. It will be led by Antonio Lazcano.

The RNA World is a hypothesis firmly rooted in empirical data and is part of a long and storied scientific perspective that goes back more than fifty years when the discovery of the centrality of RNA and ribonucleotides in protein synthesis and biochemical reactions took place. As the understanding of the properties of RNA molecules progressed, the evolutionary interpretation of their genetic properties and widespread distribution led to several independent proposals of protein-free primordial life forms. One could say that the RNA World is an early, perhaps primordial, stage during which RNA molecules played a much more conspicuous role in heredity and metabolism and, particularly, in the origin and early evolution of protein biosynthesis. The overwhelming evidence on the catalytic, regulatory and structural properties of RNA molecules can only be explained with the proposal that they played a key role in early evolution and perhaps in the origin of life itself.