A Polymer Reaction Engineering Approach to Polynucleotide Replication

摘要

It is often interesting to look at specific scientific questions from the perspective of other, related technologies. The problem of nonenzymatic RNA replication can be viewed from the perspective of classical polymer science and with some interesting insights. This communication will show that current mechanism of stalling, which is used to account for the fact that the rate of insertion errors in nonenzymatic RNA replication are much lower than would be expected, can be modeled by using the MayoLewis equation for calculating copolymer composition in copolymerizations of synthetic polymers. Using kinetic parameters from the literature, it is possible to independently predict the error threshold for RNA replication. Agreement with the accepted model for nonenzymatic replication is surprisingly good.