Selective prebiotic conversion of pyrimidine and purine anhydronucleosides into Watson-Crick base-pairing arabino-furanosyl nucleosides in water

Samuel J. Roberts; Rafał Szabla; Zoe R. Todd; Shaun Stairs; Dejan-Krešimir Bučar; Jiří Šponer; Dimitar D. Sasselov; Matthew W. Powner

doi:10.1038/s41467-018-06374-z

Nature Communications (Oct 2018)

Selective prebiotic conversion of pyrimidine and purine anhydronucleosides into Watson-Crick base-pairing arabino-furanosyl nucleosides in water

Samuel J. Roberts,
Rafał Szabla,
Zoe R. Todd,
Shaun Stairs,
Dejan-Krešimir Bučar,
Jiří Šponer,
Dimitar D. Sasselov,
Matthew W. Powner

Affiliations

Samuel J. Roberts: Department of Chemistry, University College London
Rafał Szabla: Institute of Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences
Zoe R. Todd: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Department of Astronomy, Harvard University
Shaun Stairs: Department of Chemistry, University College London
Dejan-Krešimir Bučar: Department of Chemistry, University College London
Jiří Šponer: Institute of Biophysics of the Czech Academy of Sciences
Dimitar D. Sasselov: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Department of Astronomy, Harvard University
Matthew W. Powner: Department of Chemistry, University College London

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-06374-z
Journal volume & issue: Vol. 9, no. 1
pp. 1 – 10

Abstract

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Arabinonucleic acid (ANA) Watson-Crick base-pair with RNA/DNA and can evolve to display enzyme-like function. Here, the authors now identify a prebiotic pathway that yields the complete set of Watson-Crick base-pairing purine and pyrimidine ANA nucleosides.

Published in Nature Communications

ISSN: 2041-1723 (Online)
Publisher: Nature Portfolio
Country of publisher: United Kingdom
LCC subjects: Science
Website: https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

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