ArticleACS central science2019
Insights Into the Origin of Life: Did It Begin from HCN and H
Article in ACS central science, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed, 97 citations in OpenAlex.
- A Clue for the Hen and Egg Question: The Simultaneous Formation of Uracil and Amino Acids Under Simulated Hadean Conditions.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Redox chemistry of early Earth and the origin of life.Communications chemistry · 2026Review
- Automated Discovery of Reactive Events via Hypergraph Mining of Ab Initio Atomistic Simulations.Journal of chemical theory and computation · 2026Article
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- How Does Adenine Form from Hydrogen Cyanide?Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2026Article
- A Large Scale Molecular Hessian Database for Optimizing Reactive Machine Learning Interatomic Potentials.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Review
- Lifelong Machine Learning Potentials for Chemical Reaction Network Explorations.Journal of chemical theory and computation · 2025Article
- Planetary sources of bio-essential nutrients on a prebiotic world.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Harnessing Machine Learning to Enhance Transition State Search with Interatomic Potentials and Generative Models.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Regulation of mammalian cellular metabolism by endogenous cyanide production.Nature metabolism · 2025Article
- Concomitant formation of protocells and prebiotic compounds under a plausible early Earth atmosphere.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- Mimicking lightning-induced electrochemistry on the early Earth.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- First principles reaction discovery: from the Schrodinger equation to experimental prediction for methane pyrolysis.Chemical science · 2023Article
- Multivariate Analysis Applied to Microwave-Driven Cyanide Polymerization: A Statistical View of a Complex System.Polymers · 2023Article
- Algorithmic Explorations of Unimolecular and Bimolecular Reaction Spaces.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2022Article
- Formation and evolution of C-C, C-O, C[double bond, length as m-dash]O and C-N bonds in chemical reactions of prebiotic interest.RSC advances · 2022Article
- Article
- Prebiotic synthesis of noncanonical nucleobases under plausible alkaline hydrothermal conditions.Scientific reports · 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
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The seminal Urey-Miller experiments showed that molecules crucial to life such as HCN could have formed in the reducing atmosphere of the Hadean Earth and then dissolved in the oceans. Subsequent proponents of the "RNA World" hypothesis have shown aqueous HCN to be the starting point for the formation of the precursors of RNA and proteins. However, the conditions of early Earth suggest that aqueous HCN would have had to react under a significant number of constraints. Therefore, given the limiting conditions, could RNA and protein precursors still have formed from aqueous HCN? If so, what mechanistic routes would have been followed? The current computational study, with the aid of the ab initio nanoreactor (AINR), a powerful new tool in computational chemistry, addresses these crucial questions. Gratifyingly, not only do the results from the AINR approach show that aqueous HCN could indeed have been the source of RNA and protein precursors, but they also indicate that just the interaction of HCN with water would have sufficed to begin a series of reactions leading to the precursors. The current work therefore provides important missing links in the story of prebiotic chemistry and charts the road from aqueous HCN to the precursors of RNA and proteins.
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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.