Zoe Weiss

This paper discovers a ribozyme ligase that specifically catalyzes RNA ligation when the substrate has a 3'-phosphate group, suggesting a role in primordial RNA repair and offering new tools for RNA profiling.

The paper tracks ribozyme population dynamics during in vitro selection using high-throughput sequencing data, revealing early convergence on catalytic strategies.

This study shows that an RNA ligase ribozyme evolved from using phosphorimidazole-activated substrates to triphosphate-activated substrates through neutral mutations, leading to a new structure and function.

The paper shows that specific RNA sequences can be nonenzymatically aminoacylated and ligated to form amino acid-bridged stem-loop RNAs, with structural and functional similarities to modern tRNA.

REVERSE provides a web-based tool for rapid analysis of NGS data from in vitro selection/evolution experiments, offering preprocessing and sequence analysis without requiring programming skills.

The paper introduces an algorithm to detect rare or novel cell types in single-cell gene expression data and identifies a putative new hippocampal cell type.