Common origins of RNA, protein and lipid precursors in a cyanosulfidic protometabolism

By Bhavesh H Patel, Claudia Percivalle, Dougal J. Ritson, Colm D. Duffy, J. Sutherland. Nature Chemistry, 2015

783 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A minimal cell can be thought of as comprising informational, compartment-forming and metabolic subsystems. Imagining the abiotic assembly of such an overall system, however, places great demands on hypothetical prebiotic chemistry. The perceived differences and incompatibilities between these subsystems have led to the widely held assumption that one or other subsystem must have preceded the others. Here, we have experimentally investigated the validity of this assumption by examining the assembly of various biomolecular building blocks from prebiotically plausible intermediates and one-carbon feedstock molecules. We show that precursors of ribonucleotides, amino acids and lipids can all be derived by reductive homologation of hydrogen cyanide and some of its derivatives and thus that all the cellular subsystems could have arisen simultaneously through common chemistry. The key reaction steps are driven by UV light, use hydrogen sulfide as reductant and can be accelerated by Cu(I)-Cu(II) photoredox cycling.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c037884a8133157f7c293dc9db635397bcaf7d67

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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4. C. Qi
5. K. Oberg
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In Molecular Biology

1. S. Islam
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Citations in the corpus

• Prebiotic selection and assembly of proteinogenic amino acids and natural nucleotides from complex mixtures (2017, background): “For example, Sutherland and co-workers recently demonstrated the stepwise prebiotic syntheses of 12 aminonitrile (13) proteinogenic amino acid precursors, but paradoxically, essential ketones—such as acetone (2o), monohydroxyacetone (2p) and dihydroxyacetone (2q)—are required during assembly of the ”
• The Surface UV Environment on Planets Orbiting M Dwarfs: Implications for Prebiotic Chemistry and the Need for Experimental Follow-up (2017, background): “These scenarios can be tested empiricallythrough laboratory studies to measure the reaction rate of putative UV-dependent prebiotic pathways (e.g., Ritson & Sutherland 2012; Patel et al. 2015; Xu et al. 2016) to the amplitude of irradiation.”
• Molecules with ALMA at Planet-forming Scales (MAPS). I. Program Overview and Highlights (2021, background): “While we do not know how life originated on Earth, nitriles and other small, reactive organics are implicated in several origins of life scenarios (Powner et al. 2009; Patel et al. 2015; Pearce et al. 2017) and their distributions in the inner regions of disks are of special interest.”