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Updated: Aug 17, 2026

A New Screening Method for the Directed Evolution of Thermostable Bacteriolytic Enzymes
Published on: November 7, 2012
Directed molecular evolution
L F Harris1, M R Sullivan, D L Hatfield
1David F. Hickok Memorial Cancer Research Laboratory, Abbott Northwestern Hospital, Minneapolis, MN 55407, USA. harrislf@sp.msl.umn.edu
Abstract:
We propose the existence of a relationship of stereochemical complementarity between gene sequences that code for interacting components: nucleic acid-nucleic acid, protein-protein and protein-nucleic acid. Such a relationship would impose evolutionary constraints on the DNA sequences themselves, thus retaining these sequences and governing the direction of the evolutionary process. Therefore, we propose that prebiotic, template-directed autocatalytic synthesis of mutally cognate peptides and polynucleotides resulted in their amplification and evolutionary conservation in contemporary prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms as a genetic regulatory apparatus. If this proposal is correct, then the relationships between the sequences in DNA coding for these interactions constitute a life code of which the genetic code is only one aspect of the many related interactions encoded in DNA.
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