ReviewLife (Basel, Switzerland)2015
The origin and evolution of ribonucleotide reduction.
Review in Life (Basel, Switzerland), 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 58 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
58 citing papers in PubMed, 99 citations in OpenAlex.
- Nature's Anaerobic Toolkit: Glycyl Radical Enzymes and Their Expanding Functional and Mechanistic Diversity.Biochemistry · 2026Review
- Substrate Specificity of B12-Depedent Ribonucleotide Reductases: Biotechnology and Metabolic Implications.Chembiochem : a European journal of chemical biology · 2026Article
- Ribonucleotide reductases recapitulate biogeographic patterns within virioplankton according to ocean biogeochemistry.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- MD-Phylogeny: Constructing Statistically Supported Phylogenetic Trees from Protein Structures Using Molecular Dynamics.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2026Article
- Studying the Evolution of Protein Structure One Superfamily at a Time.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2026Article
- Structural phylogenetics unravels the evolutionary diversification of communication systems in gram-positive bacteria and their viruses.Nature structural & molecular biology · 2025Article
- How ATP and dATP reposition class III ribonucleotide reductase cone domains to regulate enzyme activity.Science advances · 2025Article
- Impact of 2'-deoxyribo-purine substrates on nonenzymatic RNA template-directed primer extension.Nucleic acids research · 2025Article
- Zeta CrAss-like Phages, a Separate Phage Family Using a Variety of Adaptive Mechanisms to Persist in Their Hosts.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Review
- Bacterial transcriptional repressor NrdR - a flexible multifactorial nucleotide sensor.The FEBS journal · 2025Article
- NrdR in Streptococcus and Listeria spp.: DNA Helix Phase Dependence of the Bacterial Ribonucleotide Reductase Repressor.Molecular microbiology · 2025Article
- The Last Universal Common Ancestor of Ribosome-Encoding Organisms: Portrait of LUCA.Journal of molecular evolution · 2024Review
- Article
- Protein engineering a PhotoRNR chimera based on a unifying evolutionary apparatus among the natural classes of ribonucleotide reductases.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Ubiquitous, BISME communications · 2023Article
- Biological Catalysis and Information Storage Have Relied onBiomolecules · 2023Review
- Characterisation of aneLife · 2023Article
- Structome: a tool for the rapid assembly of datasets for structural phylogenetics.Bioinformatics advances · 2023Article
- Prognostic and Immunological Potential of Ribonucleotide Reductase Subunits in Liver Cancer.Oxidative medicine and cellular longevity · 2023Article
- Comprehensive phylogenetic analysis of the ribonucleotide reductase family reveals an ancestral clade.eLife · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Ribonucleotide reduction is the only pathway for de novo synthesis of deoxyribonucleotides in extant organisms. This chemically demanding reaction, which proceeds via a carbon-centered free radical, is catalyzed by ribonucleotide reductase (RNR). The mechanism has been deemed unlikely to be catalyzed by a ribozyme, creating an enigma regarding how the building blocks for DNA were synthesized at the transition from RNA- to DNA-encoded genomes. While it is entirely possible that a different pathway was later replaced with the modern mechanism, here we explore the evolutionary and biochemical limits for an origin of the mechanism in the RNA + protein world and suggest a model for a prototypical ribonucleotide reductase (protoRNR). From the protoRNR evolved the ancestor to modern RNRs, the urRNR, which diversified into the modern three classes. Since the initial radical generation differs between the three modern classes, it is difficult to establish how it was generated in the urRNR. Here we suggest a model that is similar to the B12-dependent mechanism in modern class II RNRs.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.