Chemists have demonstrated for the first time how RNA may have copied itself on early Earth — solving a bottleneck that had blocked the origin-of-life field for decades

A paper published in Nature Chemistry in May 2025 describes what its authors call the first demonstration of exponential RNA replication by a polymerase ribozyme under conditions that could plausibly have occurred on the early Earth. The work comes from Dr James Attwater and Dr Philipp Holliger at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in [...] The post Chemists have demonstrated for the first time how RNA may have copied itself on early Earth — solving a bottleneck that had blocked the origin-