Letter to Editor:Evolution of translational machinery: Could translation termination come into being before elongation?

摘要

The origin of modern translational apparatus is one of principal evolutionary questions. Great complexity of translational machinery makes it hard to divide the process of its evolution into a sequence of discrete steps each being beneficial or neutral for the system as a whole. In the recent paper, Taylor (2006) made an attempt to tackle this problem, presenting a molecular model for the origin of translational machinery in the RNA world, based on the quite generally accepted assumption that the ribosome originated from the ancestral RNA-based RNA polymer-ase (Gordon, 1995; Jeffares et al., 1998; Taylor, 2004). The RNA-based RNA polymerase itself is hypothesized as a first self-replicating molecule in the RNA world (Ma and Yu, 2006).