UT Supercomputer Peers into Origins of Life

Supercomputer simulations at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) National Institute for Computational Sciences are helping scientists unravel how nucleic acids could have contributed to the origins of life.

A research team led by Governor’s Chair Professor Jeremy Smith, who also directs ORNL’s Center for Molecular Biophysics, used molecular dynamics simulation to probe an organic chemical reaction that may have been important in the evolution of ribonucleic acids, or RNA, in early life forms.

The research was published as "Magnesium-Dependent Active-Site Conformational Selection in the Diels-Alderase Ribozyme" in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The research team included Tomasz Berezniak and Mai Zahran, who are Smith’s graduate students, and Petra Imhof and Andres Jäschke from the University of Heidelberg.

"Magnesium-Dependent Active-Site Conformational Selection in the Diels-Alderase Ribozyme?" Huh? What a waste of taxpayer dollars. These pointy-headed geeks just need to read their Bible, if they even have one. It's all explained right there in the first chapter.

Next thing you know they'll try to tell us the Earth is more than 6,000 years old and Jesus didn't ride dinosaurs. We don't need this kind of blasphemy in our institutions of higher learning.