4 ms·

it's much more than 1 in 2^90. this specific 45 base sequence was found by random search which strongly implies that the odds of finding such a protein are much

• cyberax 8mo ago
  (these are not proteins, these are RNA sequences) And it's likely that there are even smaller replicators but probably not much smaller. And there are likely more configurations among these 45 base-combinations that can self-replicate. It's also more likely that the first replicators were arrangements of multiple smaller molecules that can amplify themselves, and not just one large molecule. But even this longer sequence is well within the realm of synthesis by pure chance. RNA molecules can grow base-by-base, so a random walk model should eventually produce it.
• Kotlopou 8mo ago
  Actually, the search here is chemical -- you make a bunch of random small RNA sequences, then chemically replicate those that do what you want, and after a few cycles of this you find just a few sequences dominating the population. The pools can easily reach 10^14 examples and more, because you don't need a separate container/experiment for each one, but do it all together in one batch. The keyword is SELEX, a pretty cool idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_evolution_of_ligands_by_exponential_enrichment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_evolution_of_ligand...