Self‐replication in a minimal chemical system represents both a goal and a challenge for bioorganic chemistry, which concerns itself, among other things, with trying to understand the origin of life. A partial success can now be reported in the creation of a model system consisting of nucleic acid building blocks and capable of self replication under replicase‐free conditions. This article presents evidence that a self complementary template can accelerate—in a highly selective way—the further incorporation of subunits into sequentially homologous oligonucleotides.
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Kiedrowski et al. (1989) studied this question.