Can the RNA World Still Function without Cytidine?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most scenarios for the origin of life assume that RNA played a key role in both catalysis and information storage. The A, U, G, and C nucleobases in modern RNA all participate in secondary structure formation and replication. However, the rapid deamination of C to U and the absence of C in meteorite samples suggest that prebiotic RNA may have been deficient in cytosine. Here, we assess the ability of RNA sequences formed from a three-letter AUG alphabet to perform both structural and genetic roles in comparison to sequences formed from the AUGC alphabet. Despite forming less thermodynamically stable helices, the AUG alphabet can find a broad range of structures and thus appears sufficient for catalysis in the RNA World. However, in the AUG case, longer sequences are required to form structures with an equivalent complexity. Replication in the AUG alphabet requires GU pairing. Sequence fidelity in the AUG alphabet is low whenever G's are present in the sequence. We find that AUG sequences evolve to AU sequences if GU pairing is rare, and to RU sequences if GU pairing is common (R denotes A or G). It is not possible to conserve a G at a specific site in either case. These problems do not rule out the possibility of an RNA World based on AUG, but they show that it wouldbe significantly more difficult than with a four-base alphabet.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".