Powner, MW;
Stairs, S;
Nikmal, A;
Bucar, DK;
Szostak, JW;
Zheng, SL;
(2017)
Divergent prebiotic synthesis of pyrimidine and 8-oxo-purine ribonucleotides.
Nature Communications
, 8
, Article 15270. 10.1038/ncomms15270.
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Abstract
Understanding prebiotic nucleotide synthesis is a long standing challenge thought to be essential to elucidating the origins of life on Earth. Recently, remarkable progress has been made, but to date all proposed syntheses account separately for the pyrimidine and purine ribonucleotides; no divergent synthesis from common precursors has been proposed. Moreover, the prebiotic syntheses of pyrimidine and purine nucleotides that have been demonstrated operate under mutually incompatible conditions. Here, we tackle this mutual incompatibility by recognizing that the 8-oxo-purines share an underlying generational parity with the pyrimidine nucleotides. We present a divergent synthesis of pyrimidine and 8-oxo-purine nucleotides starting from a common prebiotic precursor that yields the β-ribo-stereochemistry found in the sugar phosphate backbone of biological nucleic acids. The generational relationship between pyrimidine and 8-oxo-purine nucleotides suggests that 8-oxo-purine ribonucleotides may have played a key role in primordial nucleic acids prior to the emergence of the canonical nucleotides of biology.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Divergent prebiotic synthesis of pyrimidine and 8-oxo-purine ribonucleotides |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/ncomms15270 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms15270 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ © The Author(s) 2017 |
| 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/1546036 |
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