蛋白质和核酸起源的研究进展

Advances Concerning the Studies on the Origin of Nucleic Acid and Protein

生命起源一直是科学家们所关注的问题。几个世纪以来,人们从不同角度进行了多方面的探讨。核酸和蛋白质的起源就是从分子水平来研究这一问题的。由于蛋白质具有多种生物学功能,而DNA则是大多数生物的重要遗传物质,故过去多把注意力集中在蛋白质和DNA上。近年来随着分子生物学的迅猛发展,核酸的研究工作突飞猛进,特别是RNA的种类及功能的一系列新发现,为核酸和蛋白质起源问题提供了新的证据,推进了生命科学的发展。本文综述该领域的进展概况。

The origin of life is a question to which scientists have beeb paying close attention all along.In the past centuries,people explored this problem from various angles in many ways,and the origin of nucleic acid and proteib has been studied extensively at molecular level.As protein has many biological functions and DNA is an important genetic substance of living organism, people usually concentrated their interests on protein and DNA in the past, thus prompted the development in molecular biology,and the studies of RNA have been improved greatly in recent years, especially in a series discoveries of new kinds and functions of RNA which have provided enough evidences for the origin of nucleic acid and protein,and propelled the life science forward.This paper made a summary of this aspect.