Self-replication design

Kassianidis, E., Philp, D., Design and implementation of a highly selective minimal self-replicating system. Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. 2006,45, 6344-6348. 

Wintner, Edward A., Recent Developments in the Design of Self-Replicating Systems, 3, 225. 

So, how close have supramolecular chemists come to realizing a self-replicating system The answer is not too close. There are few chemists currently working on the problem from a perspective of a system based on supramolecular chemistry. One requirement of any system designed to perpetuate information is that it must encode a large amount of information. In the DNA/RNA system it is in the form of... 

Chemical self-replicating systems fall into two categories those that are predicated on biological building blocks, such as amino acids or nucleotides, and those that avoid biological associations. While approaches based on the former have been quite successful, those based on the latter are usually simpler in design and execution. 

RNA has proven to be a remarkably malleable tool in the hands of biochemists, and a satisfactory RNA-dependent RNA polymerase ribozyme will probably be developed in the laboratory eventually. When that happens, it will be the culmination of at least a decade s worth of directed efforts, using complex combinations of rational design and in vitro evolution. It will be an important demonstration that further strengthens the case that an RNA World could have existed, but it will also show that RNA polymerase ribozymes do not appear to be a simple functionality that is likely to appear de novo from a naive population of RNA molecules. The possibility of a self-replicating RNA system less sophisticated than a general RNA-dependent RNA polymerase ribozyme cannot be eliminated. 

---