Catalytic Synthesis of Polyribonucleic Acid on Prebiotic Rock Glasses

[sethoflagos]

Just how excited ought we be about these recently published results?

Craig A. Jerome, Hyo-Joong Kim, Stephen J. Mojzsis, Steven A. Benner, and Elisa Biondi.Astrobiology.ahead of print http://doi.org/10.1089/ast.2022.0027

[exchemist]

4 hours ago, sethoflagos said:

Just how excited ought we be about these recently published results?

Craig A. Jerome, Hyo-Joong Kim, Stephen J. Mojzsis, Steven A. Benner, and Elisa Biondi.Astrobiology.ahead of print http://doi.org/10.1089/ast.2022.0027

Excited I don’t know, as I don’t follow abiogenesis research enough to know how radical this finding is. But if mafic glasses available on the surface of the Hadean earth can catalyse RNA polymerisation, that has to be an important piece of the jigsaw. 

Are there models for where the nucleoside phosphate monomers could have come from?

[sethoflagos]

3 hours ago, exchemist said:

Are there models for where the nucleoside phosphate monomers could have come from?

There seems to have been some progress there too. Quoting from https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/quarterly-reviews-of-biophysics/article/nucleic-acids-function-and-potential-for-abiogenesis/842529B9BDAD6E86F7919827725C1931

Quote

However, the need for direct N-glycosidic bond formation between ribose and pyrimidine nucleobase was elegantly circumvented by the landmark discovery of a prebiotic synthesis of activated RNA pyrimidine nucleotides (C, U) in high yields from simple prebiotically-accessible precursor molecules and inorganic phosphate via amino-oxazolines (Powner et al. Reference Powner, Gerland and Sutherland2009). In a different pathway, a recently described synthesis of the RNA purine nucleosides (A, G) from formamido-pyrimidines and ribose yielded the correct N9 regioisomer and ribose β-anomer, also avoiding the direct coupling of the full nucleobase and ribose (Becker et al. Reference Becker, Thoma, Deutsch, Gehrke, Mayer, Zipse and Carell2016) and its associated problems in yield and stereoselectivity (Fuller et al. Reference Fuller, Sanchez and Orgel1972).

These syntheses provide proof of principle that a prebiotic synthesis of the four RNA building blocks from simple organic precursors is possible and lessens the need for pre-RNA and/or proto-RNA world scenarios.