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The two scientists, Takahiro Takahashi and Yoshihiro Koyama, came up

March 7, 2017 by Kenneth Newton

The two scientists, Takahiro Takahashi and Yoshihiro Koyama, came up with this idea when they had a chance to look at a system of self-destructive RNA molecules. The authors of the first paper, who were all members of the same University of Tokyo, said that they wanted to show how they could make RNA-based systems self-replicating. They had been working on self-replicating RNA for about a decade, and they wanted to see if they could make them self-replicating at the same time—by just adding RNA to the DNA. The two groups started working on this idea in the early 1990s, and the results of their work were not very promising. They had a problem. Instead of seeing how RNA could self-replicate, they saw just how complex it was.

This led them to build a system called a CsRNA cell. The system was made from a sample and had all of the RNA in it. The CsRNA cell uses a tiny RNA molecule as a base, and takes a molecule of RNA, and makes a copy of it. So when it's put inside a DNA molecule, it takes a single strand of DNA, which is a sequence in the CsRNA cell. The genome of the CsRNA cell gets modified when you're trying to produce a protein. The cell does not need to produce proteins if it doesn't want to. The DNA that produces the protein, like the cell, is used to build the CsRNA cell—which basically makes it self-destructive. And the cells that do self-destruct can't produce proteins anymore.

The cells that do not self-destruct can produce proteins, and they can't produce any new proteins. One of the things they were able to show in their work was that they could fix all of this kind of problem in a few hours, not just over an hour—just because you didn't want to do it over the course of a day or two. And they did that by using a tiny CsRNA cell, which is what made the CsRNA cell self-destructive, which is what makes it self-destructive in the first place.

Now we're seeing that sort of self-destructive RNA self-replicating system that you see in the work of these two, which also shows that there's a way to make self-destructive RNA self-replicating.