Talk:Structural Biochemistry/RNA World Hypothesis

I rated the reliability of this page as poor for the following reasons:

1) The page states that life originated 300 million years ago, when in fact multicellular organisms are much much older than that, and dinosaurs were happily roaming the earth by around 250 mya. Most current models put the origin of life at around 3.5 to 4.0 billion years ago.

2) The citations are not complete. The earliest RNA world discussions in the literature, I believe, are found in the following places (maybe I am missing some):

Gilbert, W. (1986) "Origin of life: The RNA world", Nature 319, 618-618.

Woese, C. R. (1968) The Genetic Code, Harper & Row.

Orgel, L. E. (1968) "Evolution of the genetic apparatus", J. Mol. Biol. 38, 381-393.

Crick, F. H. (1968) "The origin of the genetic code", J. Mol. Biol. 38, 367-379.

Rich, A. (1962) On the Problems of Evolution and Biochemical Information Transfer, in Horizons in Biochemistry (Kasha, M., and Pullman, B., Eds.), pp 103–126, New York: Academic.

The Alex Rich citation is a bit obscure because it is a book chapter and is not easy to get. But I have a copy of the book and Alex has a detailed description of an RNA World and even specifically predicts ribozymes. "There are specific stereochemical reasons why polynucleotides can act as their own catalysts for self replication" (page 114) So I believe Alex Rich should be cited in any history of the RNA World hypothesis.

And of course Carl Woese, too.

Cheers Loren Williams