Powner, MW;
Roberts, S;
Stairs, S;
Bucar, D;
Szabla, R;
Todd, Z;
Šponer, J;
(2018)
Selective prebiotic conversion of pyrimidine and purine anhydronucleosides into Watson-Crick base-pairing arabino-furanosyl nucleosides in water.
Nature Communications
, 9
, Article 4073. 10.1038/s41467-018-06374-z.
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Abstract
Prebiotic nucleotide synthesis is crucial to understanding the origins of life on Earth. There are numerous candidates for life’s first nucleic acid, however, currently no prebiotic method to selectively and concurrently synthesise the canonical Watson–Crick base-pairing pyrimidine (C, U) and purine (A, G) nucleosides exists for any genetic polymer. Here, we demonstrate the divergent prebiotic synthesis of arabinonucleic acid (ANA) nucleosides. The complete set of canonical nucleosides is delivered from one reaction sequence, with regiospecific glycosidation and complete furanosyl selectivity. We observe photochemical 8-mercaptopurine reduction is efficient for the canonical purines (A, G), but not the non-canonical purine inosine (I). Our results demonstrate that synthesis of ANA may have been facile under conditions that comply with plausible geochemical environments on early Earth and, given that ANA is capable of encoding RNA/DNA compatible information and evolving to yield catalytic ANA-zymes, ANA may have played a critical role during the origins of life.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Selective prebiotic conversion of pyrimidine and purine anhydronucleosides into Watson-Crick base-pairing arabino-furanosyl nucleosides in water |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41467-018-06374-z |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-06374-z |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Chemistry |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10057712 |
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