The origin of life is a fascinating, unresolved problem whose deciphering would have
important scientific, epistemological and social implications. Over time, philosophers and …

RNA silencing is a central regulator of gene expression in most eukaryotes and acts both at
the transcriptional level through DNA methylation and at the post-transcriptional level …

The Logic of Chance offers a reappraisal and a new synthesis of theories, concepts, and
hypotheses on the key aspects of the evolution of life on earth in light of comparative …

Although they induce symptoms in plants similar to those accompanying virus infections,
viroids have unique structural, functional, and evolutionary characteristics. They are …

Viroids are single-stranded, circular, and noncoding RNAs that infect plants. They replicate
in the nucleus or chloroplast and then traffic cell-to-cell through plasmodesmata and long …

Background: A small class of RNA molecules, in particular the tiny genomes of viroids, are
circular. Yet most structure prediction algorithms handle only linear RNAs. The most …

Hepatitis delta virus (HDV) is a sub-viral agent that is dependent for its life cycle on hepatitis
B virus (HBV). The help it obtains from HBV is limited to the sharing of envelope proteins …

RNA interference (RNAi) is a conserved sequence-specific, gene-silencing mechanism that
is induced by double-stranded RNA. RNAi holds great promise as a novel nucleic acid …

Viroids are small, circular RNA pathogens, which infect several crop plants and can cause
diseases of economic importance. They do not code for proteins but they contain a number …

Background The origin of the translation system is, arguably, the central and the hardest
problem in the study of the origin of life, and one of the hardest in all evolutionary biology …