Nature Communications (Apr 2016)

Spontaneous formation and base pairing of plausible prebiotic nucleotides in water

  • Brian J. Cafferty,
  • David M. Fialho,
  • Jaheda Khanam,
  • Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy,
  • Nicholas V. Hud

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms11328
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7, no. 1
pp. 1 – 8

Abstract

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One of the questions for prebiotic chemistry is the formation of complementary base pairing systems. Here, the authors show that plausible two prebiotic heterocycles can form glycosidic bonds with ribose in water and that these spontaneously base-pair in aqueous solution.