Excerpt

In this 1994 paper, Peter Schuster, Walter Fontana, Peter F. Stadler, and Ivo L. Hofacker reviewed a series of findings arising from a computational model of ribonucleic acid (RNA), published during the 1980s and early ’90s. Insights from this model not only supported previous theoretical ideas on the early evolution of life, but also gave rise to a computational framework for the study of the molecular principles of the evolutionary process. Such framework was groundbreaking, combining notions of information and coding theory with ideas from biochemistry, genetics, structural biology, and bioinformatics.

The choice of RNA as a computational model was not serendipitous. Peter Schuster had previously collaborated with Manfred Eigen on the theory of quasi-species and the hypercycle (Eigen and Schuster 1977; Eigen, McCaskill, and Schuster 1988). A central theme of their contributions was the chemistry of prebiotic systems. By the early ’70s molecular biology had established the universal role of RNA in the flow of genetic information, as well as uncovered molecular mechanisms for the replication of RNA viruses (Spiegelman 1971). These findings made RNA an interesting model for studying molecular evolution.

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