@Art seems to be asking how I locate this finding within origin-of-life discussions, while @Rumraket is asking why I felt the need to draw that limiting line in the first place. I think both of those can be answered together.
I do think it is important to state that limitation, though not because I find the discovery uninteresting. Quite the opposite—I think it is genuinely fascinating, and I would regret giving any other impression. I agree with @Art that it “has the potential to stand some models and hypotheses on their heads,” and that sort of result can be very fruitful for science. At the category level, this does broaden what biology has shown to be chemically possible, and in that respect it may well stimulate new hypotheses in origin-of-life research.
My caution is simply about a particular inferential step. There is a large distance between this discovery and saying, “This lends support to a proposed early mechanism of direct RNA-protein sequence interaction involved in the origin of translation and the genetic code.” Those are not the same claim, and I think it matters to keep them distinct.
I say that because the paper describes a highly specialized extant molecular system, operating in living bacteria, and producing a low-complexity alternating dinucleotide repeat. That alone is enough to make it very interesting. But the origin of translation and the origin of the genetic code would seem to require something much more specific and much more ambitious: some account of how sequence relations between nucleic acids and proteins could become stable, meaningful, heritable, and functionally integrated within a larger self-maintaining system. This finding does not yet get us there. It broadens the space of analogy, and perhaps of conceptual possibility, but that still seems to me a long way from positive support for a seedbed of translation or coding.
So my reason for stressing that point was mainly methodological. In origin-of-life discussions, people often move too quickly from “apparently this is possible” to “I bet this is what happened.” I just think possible and actual should be kept separate. The former is entirely fair; the latter requires a much tighter correspondence between the phenomenon observed and the explanatory task in view.
So, speaking only for myself, I would put it this way: The discovery may be suggestive in a broad heuristic sense, and it may indeed inspire worthwhile new hypotheses about non-random oligomer formation or other prebiotic possibilities. Even so, as things stand, I think it is better understood as an expansion of the known landscape of biochemical mechanism than as meaningful evidential support for any specific model of the origin of translation or the genetic code.
