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Simple reaction makes the building blocks of a nucleic acid - Oxygen Scavenger Chemical by icdenta icdenta
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Simple reaction makes the building blocks of a nucleic acid - Oxygen Scavenger Chemical by ICDENTA ICDENTA
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| Article Posted: 08/15/2013 |
| Article Views: 55 |
| Articles Written: 1096 - MORE ARTICLES FROM THIS AUTHOR |
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Simple reaction makes the building blocks of a nucleic acid - Oxygen Scavenger Chemical |
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Origin-of-life researchers face a deceptively straightforwardquestion: how did simple chemicals produce complex biochemistry?The complexity of this starts to come in when you consider the manycomplex biomolecules that would have been useful or essential tothe first biochemical reactions. And it gets worse when youconsider that there are lots of simple organic chemicals thatplausibly could have been present on the early Earth. Figuring outwhich reactions to even start looking at can be a real challenge. The extent of that challenge was highlighted a few years back, whena Cambridge lab suggested most earlier researchers had gone down adead end. Previously, researchers tried to build up a sugar and anucleic acid base separately, and then link to them to formprecursors of DNA and RNA.
But the group from Cambridge showed it was possible to build relatively simple compounds into a three-ring chemicalthat could then be converted into cytosine, an RNA component. Now,they've revisited that work and shown that all of the precursors ofthat reaction can be made with little more than cyanide. The reaction the group reported back in 2009 only required a set oftwo or three carbon precursors, but these molecules were alreadysomewhat complex: cyanamide, cyanoacetylene, glycolaldehyde, andglyceraldehyde. We don't know that all of these chemicals would becommon on a pre-biotic Earth, which leaves its relevance to theorigin of life a somewhat open question. In a new paper, the same lab tackles forming the simple, two- andthree-atom sugars used in their earlier work (glycolaldehyde andglyceraldehyde).
To get there, they started with nothing morecomplex than hydrogen cyanide, a simple molecule comprised of oneatom each of hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen. Hydrogen cyanide formsreadily under a variety of conditions, and has been found onseveral bodies in our Solar System, as well as in the interstellarmedium. The authors were intrigued by reports in the literature of a cyclethat involves a set of six cyanide molecules, coordinated by twocopper atoms. In a water solution, this complex can cycle, drivenby ultraviolet light, through a set of reactions that alternatelyspit out cyanide, protons, and electrons.
These electrons gettemporarily attached to water molecules, and typically end up beingtaken up by a scavenger molecule, usually nitrate. However, somereports in the literature noted that, when nitrate isn't added tothe reaction, some undefined larger molecules formed. The authors went back and checked these reaction products, andfound that they included both glycolaldehyde andglyceraldehyde the two chemicals that were key building blocks ofthe reaction that produced the RNA precursor. And all the reactionrequired was copper ions and some UV light. If left to continue cycling, the products of the reaction alsoincluded some more complex, five-atom ringed structures thatincorporate nitrogen and oxygen in the ring.
But the authorssuspect that with the right conditions namely the ones identifiedin the earlier paper the products of this new cycle could be sentdirectly on to form cytosine. They also suggest the addition ofother metals could shift the products to additional chemicals thatmay have biological relevance. Hopefully, it's safe to assume the lab already has these projectsin the works.
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