Shannon Kim

This study shows that aminoacyl-RNA loop-closing ligation is stereoselective, favoring L-amino acids over D-amino acids, and suggests this process could have contributed to the emergence of homochirality in amino acids.

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.