Szostak, Jack

This creates a dilemma of a different sort. How are we to demonstrate ribozyme activities that no longer exist Perhaps we must design our own ribozymes to demonstrate the full potential for RNA to act as an enzyme. This approach is being used by Jack Szostak and Gerald Joyce, who indepen-... 

The SELEX technology (Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential enrichment) was introduced by Larry Gold and Jack Szostak [1, 2] and provides a powerful tool for the in vitro selection of nucleic acids (aptamers) from combinatorial DNA or RNA libraries against a target molecule. 

JACK W. SZOSTAK, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Harvard University... 

I acknowledge Jennifer Doudna, Michael Famulok, and Jack Szostak for helpful discussions during the preparation of the manuscript, and David Bartel for insights into the importance of fidelity in template-directed polymerizations. 

Citrate works with metals that work with RNA Jack Szostak s lab, working with protocells made from simple membranes, found that magnesium in the protocells would actually start to cut apart RNA strands. This problem went away when citrate was added to the mix, because the citrate helped moderate the bad magnesium chemistry. Remember that citrate is central to the citric acid cycle and works well with iron, so it would have been very useful for early biochemical cycles. Here again, adding more early-Earth chemicals makes for more successful reactions. 

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