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I am working on a project that involves creating alien life from scratch and I was wondering if PNA would be a good replacement for DNA, since I want it to be able to function with a carbon-based species. Apart from that, I am wondering what the pros and cons would be of a species with PNA instead of DNA

For people who do not know that it is PNA it is basically the same as DNA but instead of a deoxiborrosa-phosphatic the skeleton is a "peptide" so its translation would be "peptidic-nucleotide acid" by the way I have a question this is more Difficult once the advantages and disadvantages that so different would be your ribosomes? Since I could find something interesting with this, a guy said that he could make an enzyme capable of storing information but I don't know how true this is and I would make me strange, but because he did not give explanations but hey the main thing is viable or not, what of advantages and disadvantages, on ribosomes it is secondary

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    $\begingroup$ Do you have a positive reason for wanting to use PNA, or is it just an interesting-looking difference? $\endgroup$
    – John Dallman
    Commented Sep 3 at 19:09
  • $\begingroup$ Well I saw that it is similar to DNA, that that would not make the alien species so different that well it would be impossible to do something like that and more so because I am a novice in this, so I ask if it is viable and if it is, what are its advantages and disadvantages? $\endgroup$
    – Idon'tknow
    Commented Sep 3 at 19:46
  • $\begingroup$ The main issue is that PNA is an unnatural molecule. It's not a replacement for DNA except in some cases. $\endgroup$
    – Kilisi
    Commented Sep 3 at 20:32
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    $\begingroup$ You need a definition or at minimum a link concerning what PNA even is, also to fix the title so it reads the same as the question and then you probably need to narrow this down, current question seems to require a list to answer. $\endgroup$
    – Ash
    Commented Sep 4 at 5:22
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    $\begingroup$ I answered what I think your intention in this question was, but I'll echo the other comments here: your question lacks clarity and detail, which are both required for a high quality answer. I'd suggest taking a look at some of the other popular questions here to see what kind of questions get a lot of attention and detailed answers :) $\endgroup$
    – Whitehot
    Commented Sep 5 at 8:45

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PNA is a potential precursor to RNA, so yes. It could possibly evolve as we understand it in an Alien species. It hasn't been proven to be prebiotic but it's ease of manufacture and stability make it a reasonable possibility until/unless further knowledge discounts it.

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In theory, yes

PNA is capable of storing information in a similar manner to DNA. It would need its own suite of biomolecular engines to make its cells work, seeing as everything that we know has been modelling by millions of years of evolution to fit the DNA -> RNA -> proteins system. A sufficiently technologically-advanced species could create such a cell in a lab. I would not be able to tell you how those differences impact the cell though, as I imagine PNA is less practical and more energy consuming than DNA.

In practice, no

One of DNA's massive advantages over RNA and even more so over peptides is its stability. You can leave a test tube of water and DNA on your desk and it would not change one bit for thousands of years. RNA needs some special accomodations, but can survive for a few days in similar conditions. Peptide chains are very sensitive to environmental conditions, and in a lab we need to keep them in freezers to prevent them from degrading before we get the chance to study them (this is one reason why so many studies nowadays focus on DNA and RNA sequencing and not proteins). Even with our super stable DNA and a vast array of eukaryotic protective metabolisms, we accumulate about 6 mutations in our germ cells that we will pass on to our children, and our soma cells are quite prone to developping cancers due to DNA damage which is one of the leading causes of death today. I doubt your PNA-based alien life form could survive very long outside of the lab (both for an individual lifetime and in number of generations), although perhaps that's why PNA was used in the first place.

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  • $\begingroup$ is there a plausible machanism to stabilize PNA? Like for example, PNA-based lifeforms evolving in very cold environment, or chance up on some kind of a nonreactive sheath that would protect them from damage? $\endgroup$
    – Going Durden
    Commented Sep 6 at 9:26
  • $\begingroup$ @GoingDurden in theory yes, although I don't know of any. I expect that the "most stable version of PNA" is just DNA, which is why it's so popular today. Any additional investment by a living cell into a PNA-stabilising metabolism would do so at a greater cost than any DNA-stabilising one. As for environmental factors like temperature or UV exposure, yes these can be modulated, but in any case PNA will basically always be less stable than DNA at any plausible environmental conditions. $\endgroup$
    – Whitehot
    Commented Sep 9 at 8:59

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