ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
High-energy chemistry of formamide: a unified mechanism of nucleobase formation.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
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39 citing papers in PubMed, 183 citations in OpenAlex.
- The "Bagno dell'Acqua" Lake as a Novel Mars-like Analogue: Prebiotic Syntheses of PNA and RNA Building Blocks and Oligomers.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Article
- Prospects of formamide as nitrogen source in biotechnological production processes.Applied microbiology and biotechnology · 2024Review
- Experimental Gas-Phase Removal of OH Radicals in the Presence of NHACS earth & space chemistry · 2024Article
- Unveiling the chemical kinetics of aminomethanol (NHFrontiers in chemistry · 2024Article
- Infrared Spectra of Small Radicals for Exoplanetary Spectroscopy: OH, NH, CN and CH: The State of Current Knowledge.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Natural Radioactivity and Chemical Evolution on the Early Earth: Prebiotic Chemistry and Oxygenation.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- A Computational Quantum-Based Perspective on the Molecular Origins of Life's Building Blocks.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- The Prebiotic Kitchen: A Guide to Composing Prebiotic Soup Recipes to Test Origins of Life Hypotheses.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- The role of borosilicate glass in Miller-Urey experiment.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Prebiotic Route to Thymine from Formamide-A Combined Experimental-Theoretical Study.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Prebiotic Organic Chemistry of Formamide and the Origin of Life in Planetary Conditions: What We Know and What Is the Future.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Review
- Energy at Origins: Favorable Thermodynamics of Biosynthetic Reactions in the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA).Frontiers in microbiology · 2021Article
- Electron ionization of clusters containing the formamide molecule.The European physical journal. D, Atomic, molecular, and optical physics · 2021Article
- Impact-induced amino acid formation on Hadean Earth and Noachian Mars.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Monitoring the Reactivity of Formamide on Amorphous SiOMolecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- A Constructive Way to Think about Different Hydrothermal Environments for the Origins of Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- Radical pathways for the formation of non-canonical nucleobases in prebiotic environments.RSC advances · 2019Article
- Could Purines Be Formed from Cyanamide and Cyanoacetylene in a Prebiotic Earth Environment?ACS omega · 2019Article
- Profiling Murchison Soluble Organic Matter for New Organic Compounds with APPI- and ESI-FT-ICR MS.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2019Article
- Prebiotic Soup Components Trapped in Montmorillonite Nanoclay Form New Molecules: Car-Parrinello Ab Initio Simulations.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The coincidence of the Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB) period and the emergence of terrestrial life about 4 billion years ago suggest that extraterrestrial impacts could contribute to the synthesis of the building blocks of the first life-giving molecules. We simulated the high-energy synthesis of nucleobases from formamide during the impact of an extraterrestrial body. A high-power laser has been used to induce the dielectric breakdown of the plasma produced by the impact. The results demonstrate that the initial dissociation of the formamide molecule could produce a large amount of highly reactive CN and NH radicals, which could further react with formamide to produce adenine, guanine, cytosine, and uracil. Based on GC-MS, high-resolution FTIR spectroscopic results, as well as theoretical calculations, we present a comprehensive mechanistic model, which accounts for all steps taking place in the studied impact chemistry. Our findings thus demonstrate that extraterrestrial impacts, which were one order of magnitude more abundant during the LHB period than before and after, could not only destroy the existing ancient life forms, but could also contribute to the creation of biogenic molecules.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.