ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Freeze-thaw cycles enable a prebiotically plausible and continuous pathway from nucleotide activation to nonenzymatic RNA copying.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed.
- Prebiotically Plausible Synthesis of N-Cyanoimidazole for Phosphate Activation and Templated RNA Ligation.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2026Article
- UV photodamage pathways and the evolutionary selection of thymine over uracil in early genetic systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Exonuclease Ribozyme Encoded in a Circular Genome: On the Initiation of the RNA World.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Magmatic immiscibility provides phosphate for prebiotic chemistry.Science advances · 2025Article
- From experimental clues to theoretical modeling: Evolution associated with the membrane-takeover at an early stage of life.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Selection-diversification interplay in oligonucleotide chemical evolution.Biophysics and physicobiology · 2025Article
- Overcoming nucleotide bias in the nonenzymatic copying of RNA templates.Nucleic acids research · 2024Article
- On the aqueous origins of the condensation polymers of life.Nature reviews. Chemistry · 2024Review
- Evolution of the substrate specificity of an RNA ligase ribozyme from phosphorimidazole to triphosphate activation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- How Droplets Can Accelerate Reactions─Coacervate Protocells as Catalytic Microcompartments.Accounts of chemical research · 2024Article
- Manganese(II) promotes prebiotically plausible non-enzymatic RNA ligation reactions.Chemical communications (Cambridge, England) · 2024Article
- Simulations predict preferred MgBiophysical journal · 2024Article
- Diaminopurine in Nonenzymatic RNA Template Copying.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2024Article
- Constraints on the emergence of RNA through non-templated primer extension with mixtures of potentially prebiotic nucleotides.Nucleic acids research · 2024Article
- High-Fidelity RNA Copying via 2',3'-Cyclic Phosphate Ligation.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2024Article
- Natural soda lakes provide compatible conditions for RNA and membrane function that could have enabled the origin of life.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Circular at the very beginning: on the initial genomes in the RNA world.RNA biology · 2024Article
- The protometabolic nature of prebiotic chemistry.Chemical Society reviews · 2023Review
- Accelerating DNA computing via freeze-thaw cycling.Science advances · 2023Article
- On the origin of life: an RNA-focused synthesis and narrative.RNA (New York, N.Y.) · 2023Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Nonenzymatic template-directed RNA copying using chemically activated nucleotides is thought to have played a key role in the emergence of genetic information on the early Earth. A longstanding question concerns the number and nature of different environments that might have been necessary to enable all of the steps from nucleotide synthesis to RNA copying. Here we explore three sequential steps from this overall pathway: nucleotide activation, synthesis of imidazolium-bridged dinucleotides, and template-directed RNA copying. We find that all three steps can take place in one reaction mixture undergoing multiple freeze-thaw cycles. Recent experiments have demonstrated a potentially prebiotic methyl isocyanide-based nucleotide activation chemistry. However, the original version of this approach is incompatible with nonenzymatic RNA copying because the high required concentration of the imidazole activating group prevents the accumulation of the essential imidazolium-bridged dinucleotide. Here we report that ice eutectic phase conditions facilitate not only the methyl isocyanide-based activation of ribonucleotide 5′-monophosphates with stoichiometric 2-aminoimidazole, but also the subsequent conversion of these activated mononucleotides into imidazolium-bridged dinucleotides. Furthermore, this one-pot approach is compatible with template-directed RNA copying in the same reaction mixture. Our results suggest that the simple and common environmental fluctuation of freeze-thaw cycles could have played an important role in prebiotic nucleotide activation and nonenzymatic RNA copying.
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