Scientists at The University of Manchester have developed an experiment that sheds new and fascinating light on how life on Earth might have begun.

Prof John Sutherland, Matthew Powner and Dr Beatrice Gerland from The School of Chemistry have broken new ground by synthesising almost from scratch two of the four building blocks of RNA, which is the self-replicating molecule that many scientists believe could be the original molecule for life.

The researchers believe they have shown how it was possible to make all the building blocks of RNA - which can carry and transmit information from one generation to the next - from the simple chemicals that would have existed on Earth four billion years ago.