ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2010
Intercalation as a means to suppress cyclization and promote polymerization of base-pairing oligonucleotides in a prebiotic world.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Complex and Messy Prebiotic Chemistry: Obstacles and Opportunities for an RNA World.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- From liquid-phase synthesis to chemical ligation: preparation of oligonucleotides and their backbone analogs in solution.Nucleic acids research · 2025Review
- The Pigment World: Life's Origins as Photon-Dissipating Pigments.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Which came first: the chicken, the egg, or guanine?RNA (New York, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Trinity of G-tetrads and origin of translation.Biology direct · 2022Article
- The Bootstrap Model of Prebiotic Networks of Proteins and Nucleic Acids.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Thermally Driven Membrane Phase Transitions Enable Content Reshuffling in Primitive Cells.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2021Article
- Quadruplex World.Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life · 2021Article
- Template-Directed Copying of RNA by Non-enzymatic Ligation.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2020Article
- Photon Dissipation as the Origin of Information Encoding in RNA and DNA.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- Lipid-Assisted Polymerization of Nucleotides.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2019Review
- Enzyme-free ligation of dimers and trimers to RNA primers.Nucleic acids research · 2019Article
- Spontaneous advent of genetic diversity in RNA populations through multiple recombination mechanisms.RNA (New York, N.Y.) · 2019Article
- Homochirality through Photon-Induced Denaturing of RNA/DNA at the Origin of Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2018Article
- Nucleotide Selectivity in Abiotic RNA Polymerization Reactions.Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life · 2017Article
- Evidence of liquid crystal-assisted abiotic ligation of nucleic acids.Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life · 2015Article
- Characterization of RNA-Like Oligomers from Lipid-Assisted Nonenzymatic Synthesis: Implications for Origin of Informational Molecules on Early Earth.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2015Article
- Potential pitfalls in MALDI-TOF MS analysis of abiotically synthesized RNA oligonucleotides.Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life · 2013Article
- Prebiotically plausible oligoribonucleotide ligation facilitated by chemoselective acetylation.Nature chemistry · 2013Article
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7 authors.
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Abstract
The RNA world hypothesis proposes that nucleic acids were once responsible for both information storage and chemical catalysis, before the advent of coded protein synthesis. However, it is difficult to imagine how nucleic acid polymers first appeared, as the abiotic chemical formation of long nucleic acid polymers from mononucleotides or short oligonucleotides remains elusive, and barriers to achieving this goal are substantial. One specific obstacle to abiotic nucleic acid polymerization is strand cyclization. Chemically activated short oligonucleotides cyclize efficiently, which severely impairs polymer growth. We show that intercalation, which stabilizes and rigidifies nucleic acid duplexes, almost totally eliminates strand cyclization, allowing for chemical ligation of tetranucleotides into duplex polymers of up to 100 base pairs in length. In contrast, when these reactions are performed in the absence of intercalators, almost exclusively cyclic tetra- and octanucleotides are produced. Intercalator-free polymerization is not observed, even at tetranucleotide concentrations > 10,000-fold greater than those at which intercalators enable polymerization. We also demonstrate that intercalation-mediated polymerization is most favored if the size of the intercalator matches that of the base pair; intercalators that bind to Watson-Crick base pairs promote the polymerization of oligonucleotides that form these base pairs. Additionally, we demonstrate that intercalation-mediated polymerization is possible with an alternative, non-Watson-Crick-paired duplex that selectively binds a complementary intercalator. These results support the hypothesis that intercalators (acting as 'molecular midwives') could have facilitated the polymerization of the first nucleic acids and possibly helped select the first base pairs, even if only trace amounts of suitable oligomers were available.
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