Data and code from: A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself and its complementary strand

The emergence of a chemical system capable of self-replication and evolution is a critical event in the origin of life. RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but their large size and structural complexity impede self-replication and preclude their spontaneous emergence. Here we describe QT45: a 45-nucleotide polymerase ribozyme, discovered from random sequence pools, that catalyzes general RNA-templated RNA synthesis using trinucleotide triphosphate (triplet) substrates in mildly alkaline eutectic ice. QT45 can synthesize both its complementary strand using a random triplet pool at 94.1% per-nucleotide fidelity, and a copy of itself using defined substrates, both with yields of ~0.2% in 72 days. The discovery of polymerase activity in a small RNA motif suggests that polymerase ribozymes are more abundant in RNA sequence space than previously thought.

Methods
This dataset contains raw sequencing data from (1) the fitness landscapes of the QT45 and QT39 polymerase ribozymes and (2) fidelity measurements of the QT ribozyme-catalyzed synthesis of a mini-hammerhead ribozyme, a full length hammerhead ribozyme, as well as the synthesis of its complementary strand and of itself, as described in ‘A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself and its complementary strand’.

Also contained within this repository are instructions in the form of bash scripts and commands that can be used to process this raw sequencing data into processed reads used for analysis and generation of figures found in the paper. Downstream processing code and processed data is available at a separate dataset in Zenodo.