[tt] 30 bit information channel in ribozyme replication duo

[Bryan Bishop]

Picked up from wired.com:
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/01/replicatingrna.html

"""
Life makes more of itself.

And now so can a set of custom-designed chemicals. Chemists have shown
that a group of synthetic enzymes replicated, competed and evolved
much like a natural ecosystem, but without life or cells.

"So long as you provide the building blocks and the starter seed, it
goes forever," said Gerald Joyce, a chemist at the Scripps Research
Institute and co-author of the paper published Thursday in Science.
"It is immortalized molecular information."

Joyce's chemicals are technically hacked RNA enzymes, much like the
ones we have in our bodies, but they don't behave anything like those
in living creatures. But, these synthetic RNA replicators do provide a
model for evolution — and shed light on one step in the development of
early living systems from on a lifeless globe.

Scientists believe that early life on Earth was much more primitive
than what we see around us today. It probably didn't use DNA like our
cells do. This theory of the origin of life is called the RNA World
hypothesis, and it posits that life began using RNA both to store
information, like DNA does now, and as a catalyst allowing the
molecules to reproduce. To try to understand what this life might have
looked like, researchers are trying to build models for early life
forms and in the process, they are discovering entirely new lifelike
behavior that nonetheless isn't life, at least as we know it.

As Joyce put it, "This is more of a Life 2.0 thing."

The researchers began with pairs of enzymes they've been tweaking and
designing for the past eight years. Each member of the pairs can only
reproduce with the help of the other member.

"We have two enzymes, a plus and a minus," Joyce explains. "The plus
assembles the pieces to make the minus enzyme, and the minus enzyme
assembles the pieces to draw the plus. It's kind of like biology,
where there is a DNA strand with plus and minus strands."