Scientists have created an artificial carrier of genetic information

Alternative to natural carriers of genetic information DNA and RNA are xenonucleic acids (synthesized in the laboratory) that are capable of transmitting genetic information. They can be converted into various biologically useful forms by means of "directed evolution" and applied in the form of biosensors.

An international group of researchers from the United States, England, Belgium and Denmark published in the journal Science news about their synthesized molecules, which have every chance to act as an alternative to RNA and DNA.

The question of whether such alternatives are possible has long been the subject of many studies and fierce debates in the scientific community. One of the authors of the study was John Chepet, a scientist from the Institute of Biosynthesis (University of South Arizona).

Not so long ago, he suggested that one of such alternatives would be the nucleic acid of the Threose (a threase is one of the simple sugars with the formula C4H8O4).

Now he continued to develop his own experiments in the European group dealing with the more general issue of xenonucleic acids (XNA), in other words, foreign nucleic acids, molecules that do not exist in nature, although in the same way as RNA and DNA, capable of preserving and transmitting genetic information.

Now this group for the first time has shown its developed set of 6 such "non-natural" nucleic acid polymers.

Creation on their basis of xeno-assets, which first comes to mind correspondents, is too fantastic and impossible, and its researchers, of course, did not even evaluate it.

Scientists have had enough and what can be done with XNA today. It turns out that one of them can be turned into all kinds of biologically useful forms with the help of "directed evolution".

So, in the laboratory, among other things, so-called aptamers of nucleic acids, unusual chemical sensors, sensors, which respond to the appearance of a specific chemical compound, were made. In conventional genetics, they are used, for example, to search for defects in DNA, or respond to the appearance of compounds to which they are tuned by switching off the corresponding genes. Developed by the group, xeno-aptamers are able not only to participate in similar genetic actions, they can act by the type of antibodies, with the highest efficiency finding and binding the appropriate molecules.

John Chepet acknowledges that XNA can be used to create the newest types of diagnostics and the latest xeno biosensors that will be able to work even more efficiently than natural ones, since natural guardian enzymes, tuned to destroy foreign DNA and RNA, will not be noticed.

Experimental xenobiology is a new science, the beginning of which is due to this work, according to Chepat's statement, will enable to create in the future previously unprecedented therapeutic methods.

This work on xenonucleic acids gives a possible answer to another interesting question, which for decades tortures all genetics: how on earth did DNA and RNA originate.

At the end of the last century, scientists learned that DNA was most likely produced after less complex RNA, but how RNA could be created in nature, and the hardest molecule, they did not understand. Academician A. Spirin, the world's leading expert on RNA, said somehow that he spent 2 years living on this issue, and learned that a random synthesis of RNA could happen in a time that is much longer than the lifetime of the entire universe. The probability of this event is much less than the probability that a monkey will write "War and Peace."

According to one of the theories, RNA molecules were preceded by even simpler molecules - pre-RNA, however this theory had a large number of inconsistencies that are removed if one imagines that there was another mediator between pre-RNA and RNA - some xenogenetic substance - xeno- nucleic acid.

This mediator, according to Chepat, could absolutely be his beloved nucleic acid of the Thrace. (TNCs)

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