ArticleACS central science2025
High-Yield Prebiotic Polymerization of 2',3'-Cyclic Nucleotides under Wet-Dry Cycling.
Article in ACS central science, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Concurrent Phosphite Oxidation and Adenosine Phosphorylation Under Prebiotic Evaporative Conditions.Journal of molecular evolution · 2026Article
- G-quadruplexes self-assembled from nucleotide monomers as stable prepolymer scaffolds in aqueous environments.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Theory for sequence selection via phase separation and oligomerization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Amino acids catalyse RNA formation under ambient alkaline conditions.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Selection-diversification interplay in oligonucleotide chemical evolution.Biophysics and physicobiology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The spontaneous formation of RNA polymers is a fundamental yet challenging step for the origin of life. Here we show that 2',3'-cyclic nucleotides of all four nucleobases efficiently polymerize without external activators when subjected to wet-dry cycling at room temperature in a mild alkaline pH range. We found conditions where oligomerization yields (Y) are enhanced by wet-dry cycling, reaching Y ≈ 70% for guanosine and Y ≥ 20% for other nucleobases. Microscopy monitoring during the drying process indicates that guanosine's higher reactivity stems from its self-assembly propensity at pH ≤ 10. At pH 11, guanosine ordering is disfavored, leading to a nearly stoichiometrically balanced polymerization of the four nucleotides with Y = 36%. Only water is added at each cycle, mimicking humid nights and dry days on early Earth. This leads to a broad distribution of A, U, G, and C mixed sequence oligomers, up to 6% of 4-mer and 0.1% of 10-mer, paving the way for RNA replication and evolution through subsequent templated ligation under the same pH. The combination of simple boundary conditions and a pathway toward RNA evolution makes this process a compelling model for the prebiotic origin of RNA on early Earth.
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Registered trials
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