FIGURE 2.

Populations of self-cleaving ribozymes evolved along parallel trajectories. (A) Schematic of parallel evolutionary trajectories. Each arrow represents one round of evolution starting from the shared starting population with initial sequence diversity of ∼2 × 10¹⁴ sequences. Sequenced populations are indicated along with their names. (B) Gel showing self-cleavage activity of RNA populations after five rounds of evolution in the absence (B5) or presence (C5) of montmorillonite. Activity is shown for both populations, with [+] and without [−] clay present during the reaction. Ribozymes within the population cleave at different positions in the cleavage sequence, resulting in multiple product bands for each population.