Journal
CHEMISTRY-A EUROPEAN JOURNAL
Volume 26, Issue 65, Pages 14856-14860Publisher
WILEY-V C H VERLAG GMBH
DOI: 10.1002/chem.202002929
Keywords
amino acid nucleosides; origin of life; prebiotic chemistry; RNA world; RNA-peptide world
Categories
Funding
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [SFB1309 (325871075), SPP1784 (255344185)]
- European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program [EPiR 741912]
- European Research Council (ERC) through H2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action (LightDyNAmics) [765866]
- Projekt DEAL
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Fossils of extinct species allow us to reconstruct the process of Darwinian evolution that led to the species diversity we see on Earth today. The origin of the first functional molecules able to undergo molecular evolution and thus eventually able to create life, are largely unknown. The most prominent idea in the field posits that biology was preceded by an era of molecular evolution, in which RNA molecules encoded information and catalysed their own replication. This RNA world concept stands against other hypotheses, that argue for example that life may have begun with catalytic peptides and primitive metabolic cycles. The question whether RNA or peptides were first is addressed by the RNA-peptide world concept, which postulates a parallel existence of both molecular species. A plausible experimental model of how such an RNA-peptide world may have looked like, however, is absent. Here we report the synthesis and physicochemical evaluation of amino acid containing adenosine bases, which are closely related to molecules that are found today in the anticodon stem-loop of tRNAs from all three kingdoms of life. We show that these adenosines lose their base pairing properties, which allow them to equip RNA with amino acids independent of the sequence context. As such we may consider them to be living molecular fossils of an extinct molecular RNA-peptide world.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available