Scientists may have found a molecule that explains how life began

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]Did you know scientists [music] may have found a tiny molecule that brings us one step closer to explaining how life began? It's a small strand [music] of RNA called QT45, and it may do something extraordinary, almost copy itself. For decades, [music] scientists have proposed the RNA world theory, the idea that before DNA and proteins, [music] life may have started with simple RNA molecules that could both store [music] information and replicate. But there was a problem. Lab-made RNA systems were always too large [music] and too complex to seem realistic for early Earth. They looked engineered, not primordial.

[00:00:37][music] But QT45 may change that. It's what scientists call a ribozyme, an RNA molecule [music] that can fold into a shape and act like an enzyme. And this one can perform some [music] of the hardest steps in self-replication. It can assemble building blocks into a mirror image of itself, [music] then use that mirror image as a template to rebuild the original. Not a perfect closed loop [music] yet, but astonishingly close. And here's the part most people miss. Scientists didn't [music] design QT45 from scratch. They searched through a trillion random RNA sequences [music] in freezing cold pools, and through cycles of selection, it emerged, almost like evolution in miniature. And unlike earlier ribozymes, it's strikingly [music] small and can copy its full length, not just fragments. And that matters because the smaller the molecule, the easier it is to imagine it arising spontaneously [music] in Earth's early chemistry, which makes the RNA world feel far [music] less speculative. And maybe that's the deeper significance. This isn't just about one molecule. [music] It's about narrowing the gap between chemistry and life.