Ancient microbes had medicine's RNA trick first — by billions of years

Some of the toughest microbes on Earth live in near-boiling water, and to survive there they chemically armour their RNA — the molecule that carries instructions inside cells. Teams led by Schraga Schwartz at the Weizmann Institute and Dina Grohmann at the University of Regensburg have shown, in the journal Cell, that these heat-loving archaea use the same kind of backbone tweak that drug-makers now build into RNA medicines to keep them stable. Nature, it turns out, patented the idea long before us.