When the strands are pulled apart, copying the complement on either template results in two copies of the original. All living things on Earth store information in DNA, which consists of two polymer strands wrapped around each other like a caduceus, with each strand being the complement of the other. The discovery of DNA's double-helical structure by Watson and Crick in 1953 revealed a simple explanation for how biology and evolution function. ![]() Nucleic acids were first identified in the 19 th century, but their composition, biological role and function were not understood by scientists until the 20 th century. The molecules revealed by this study could be further modified to gives hundreds of millions of potential pharmaceutical drug leads. ![]() Surprisingly, they found well over a million variants, suggesting a vast unexplored universe of chemistry relevant to pharmacology, biochemistry and efforts to understand the origins of life. Using sophisticated computational methods, scientists from the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and Emory University explored the "chemical neighbourhood" of nucleic acid analogues. Other nucleic acid-like polymers are known, yet much remains unknown regarding possible alternatives for hereditary information storage. The central role of nucleic acids in biological information flow also makes them key targets for pharmaceutical research, and synthetic molecules mimicking nucleic acids form the basis of many treatments for viral diseases, including HIV. ![]() But are they the only way to store hereditary molecular information? Some scientists believe life as we know it could not have existed before there were nucleic acids, thus understanding how they came to exist on the primitive Earth is a fundamental goal of basic research. Biology encodes information in DNA and RNA, which are complex molecules finely tuned to their functions.
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