Wet-dry cycles enable the parallel origin of canonical and non-canonical nucleosides by continuous synthesis

Sidney Becker, Christina Schneider, Hidenori Okamura, Antony Crisp, Tynchtyk Amatov, Milan Dejmek and Thomas Carell ()
Additional contact information
Sidney Becker: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Christina Schneider: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Hidenori Okamura: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Antony Crisp: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Tynchtyk Amatov: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Milan Dejmek: Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry ASCR
Thomas Carell: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Nature Communications, 2018, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract The molecules of life were created by a continuous physicochemical process on an early Earth. In this hadean environment, chemical transformations were driven by fluctuations of the naturally given physical parameters established for example by wet–dry cycles. These conditions might have allowed for the formation of (self)-replicating RNA as the fundamental biopolymer during chemical evolution. The question of how a complex multistep chemical synthesis of RNA building blocks was possible in such an environment remains unanswered. Here we report that geothermal fields could provide the right setup for establishing wet–dry cycles that allow for the synthesis of RNA nucleosides by continuous synthesis. Our model provides both the canonical and many ubiquitous non-canonical purine nucleosides in parallel by simple changes of physical parameters such as temperature, pH and concentration. The data show that modified nucleosides were potentially formed as competitor molecules. They could in this sense be considered as molecular fossils.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02639-1 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:9:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-017-02639-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-02639-1

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().