tRNA-like structures tag the 3' ends of genomic RNA molecules for replication: implications for the origin of protein synthesis

Abstract

Single-stranded RNA viruses often have 3'-terminal tRNA-like structures that serve as substrates for the enzymes of tRNA metabolism, including the tRNA synthases and the CCA-adding enzyme. We propose that such 3'-terminal tRNA-like structures are in fact molecular fossils of the original RNA world, where they tagged genomic RNA molecules for replication and also functioned as primitive telomeres to ensure that 3'-terminal nucleotides were not lost during replication. This picture suggests that the CCA-adding activity was originally an RNA enzyme, that modern DNA telomeres with the repetitive structure CmAn are the direct descendants of the CCA terminus of tRNA, and that the precursor of the modern enzyme RNase P evolved to convert genomic into functional RNA molecules by removing this 3'-terminal tRNA-like tag. Because early RNA replicases would have been catalytic RNA molecules that used the 3'-terminal tRNA-like tag as a template for the initiation of RNA synthesis, these tRNA-like structures could have been specifically aminoacylated with an amino acid by an aberrant activity of the replicase. We show that it is mechanistically reasonable to suppose that this aminoacylation occurred by the same sequence of reactions found in protein synthesis today. The advent of such tRNA synthases would thus have provided a pathway for the evolution of modern protein synthesis.