Jingszo !

Scientists believe that, in the earliest life forms, genetic material would have been carried and replicated by strands of RNA, before DNA and proteins later emerged and took over.

Yet getting strands of RNA to replicate in the lab in a simple way—i.e., that plausibly could have occurred at the outset of life—has proved challenging. RNA strands zip up into a double helix that blocks their replication. Like Velcro, these are hard to pull apart and quick to stick back together, leaving no time to copy them.

In a study described in Nature Chemistry, researchers overcame this problem by using three-letter "triplet" RNA building blocks in water and adding acid and heat, which separated the double helix. They then neutralized and froze the solution.

Paper:

Trinucleotide substrates under pH–freeze–thaw cycles enable open-ended exponential RNA replication by a polymerase ribozyme

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-025-01830-y