Eric J. Hayden

The paper experimentally validates the self-cleavage activity of 855 hairpin ribozymes using high-throughput sequencing, showing most are efficient despite rare nucleotides at conserved positions.

The paper uses probabilistic generative models to estimate the number of self-reproducing RNAs and finds that at least 10^39 such ribozymes may exist.

The paper analyzes RNA sequence to structure relationships using comprehensive mutagenesis data from self-cleaving ribozymes to identify structural features and functional critical nucleotides.

The paper uses machine learning to predict RNA enzyme activity from sequence data, showing improved predictions with more diverse training data.

The paper develops universal reference primers for qPCR-based telomere length measurement in any vertebrate species.