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The concept of catalytically active RNA was first postulated in the late 1960s as part of an elegant scenario to describe the origin of life (Woese 1967; Crick 1968; Orgel 1968). Subsequently, the unexpected discovery in the early 1980s that ribozymes were, in fact, active and essential components of contemporary living organisms was a paradigm-shifting breakthrough. Tom Cech, studying intron splicing (an intron is a region of RNA that interrupts the protein-coding region of some messenger RNAs and which must be removed in a process called RNA splicing before the mRNA can be correctly translated into a protein) (Kruger et al. 1982), and Sidney Altman, investigating ribonuclease P...
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References and Further Reading
Crick FHC (1968) The origin of the genetic code. J Mol Biol 38(3):367–379
Ellington AD, Chen X, Robertson MP, Syrett A (2009) Evolutionary origins and directed evolution of RNA. Int J Biochem Cell Biol 41(2):254–265
Gilbert W (1986) The RNA world. Nature 319:618
Guerrier-Takada C, Gardiner K, Marsh T, Pace N, Altman S (1983) The RNA moiety of ribonuclease P is the catalytic subunit of the enzyme. Cell 35(3):849–857
Joyce GF (2004) Directed evolution of nucleic acid enzymes. Annu Rev Biochem 73:791–836
Kruger K, Grabowski PJ, Zaug AJ, Sands J, Gottschling DE, Cech TR (1982) Self-splicing RNA: autoexcision and autocyclization of the ribosomal RNA intervening sequence of Tetrahymena. Cell 31(1):147–157
Nissen P, Hansen J, Ban N, Moore PB, Steitz TA (2000) The structural basis of ribosome activity in peptide bond synthesis. Science 289(5481):920–930
Noller HF, Hoffarth V, Zimniak L (1992) Unusual resistance of peptidyl transferase to protein extraction procedures. Science 256(5062):1416–1419
Orgel LE (1968) Evolution of the genetic apparatus. J Mol Biol 38(3):381–393
Woese C (1967) The genetic code: the molecular basis for genetic expression. Harper & Row, New York
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Robertson, M.P. (2015). Ribozyme. In: Gargaud, M., et al. Encyclopedia of Astrobiology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44185-5_1375
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44185-5_1375
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