Laboratory directed evolution have enabled the discovery of numerous functional natural and synthetic macromolecules with tailor-made functions. However, approaches that use enzymes to effect the crucial translation from an information carrier molecule such as DNA or RNA to synthetic polymers are limited to producing close analogs of nucleic acids, either due to a strict requirement to hybridize with a nucleic acid template or as a consequence of the limited substrate scope of polymerase enzymes. / Chemistry and Chemical Biology