While cool, I didn’t expect indefinite self-replication to be hard under these circumstances. The enzymes work by combining two halves of the other enzyme- i.e. they are not self-replicating using materials we would expect to ever naturally occur, they are self-replicating using bisected versions of themselves.
I’ve slightly downgraded my estimate for the minimum viable genome size for self-replicating RNA because I wasn’t thinking about complicated groups of cross-catalyzing RNA.
While cool, I didn’t expect indefinite self-replication to be hard under these circumstances. The enzymes work by combining two halves of the other enzyme- i.e. they are not self-replicating using materials we would expect to ever naturally occur, they are self-replicating using bisected versions of themselves.
I’ve slightly downgraded my estimate for the minimum viable genome size for self-replicating RNA because I wasn’t thinking about complicated groups of cross-catalyzing RNA.