Discovery of novel primitive xeno nucleic acids as alternative genetic polymers adds piece to origin of life puzzle

The chemical origin of life on Earth is a puzzle that scientists have been trying to piece together for decades. Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain how life came to be and what chemical and environmental factors on early Earth could have led to it. A step required in a number of these hypotheses involves the abiotic synthesis of genetic polymers—materials made up of a sequence of repeating chemical units with the ability to store and pass down information through base-pairing interactions.