ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America1998
The stability of the RNA bases: implications for the origin of life.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 1998. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 80 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
80 citing papers in PubMed, 299 citations in OpenAlex.
- A scope of prebiotic neat reaction conditions and the mechanism of urea-assisted phosphorylations of alcohols.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Origin of the RNA World in Cold Hadean Geothermal Fields Enriched in Zinc and Potassium: Abiogenesis as a Positive Fallout from the Moon-Forming Impact?Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Replication elongates short DNA, reduces sequence bias and develops trimer structure.Nucleic acids research · 2024Article
- A microbiological system for screening the interference of XNA monomers with DNA and RNA metabolism.RSC advances · 2023Article
- Sensing nucleotide composition in virus RNA.Bioscience reports · 2023Review
- Accelerating DNA computing via freeze-thaw cycling.Science advances · 2023Article
- Uracil in the carbonaceous asteroid (162173) Ryugu.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Prebiotic Synthesis of ATP: A Terrestrial Volcanism-Dependent Pathway.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Dissipative Photochemical Abiogenesis of the Purines.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Immunomodulatory Properties of Human Breast Milk: MicroRNA Contents and Potential Epigenetic Effects.Biomedicines · 2022Review
- Identifying the wide diversity of extraterrestrial purine and pyrimidine nucleobases in carbonaceous meteorites.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Thermodynamic and Kinetic Sequence Selection in Enzyme-Free Polymer Self-Assembly inside a Non-equilibrium RNA Reactor.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Mapping the Conformational Landscape of the Neutral Network of RNA Sequences That Connect Two Functional Distinctly Different Ribozymes.Chembiochem : a European journal of chemical biology · 2022Article
- Exploring the Influence of Intermolecular Interactions in Prebiotic Chemistry Using Laser Spectroscopy and Calculations.Chemistry (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2022Article
- Computational Analysis of a Prebiotic Amino Acid Synthesis with Reference to Extant Codon-Amino Acid Relationships.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Structural Dynamics of RNA in the Presence of Choline Amino Acid Based Ionic Liquid: A Spectroscopic and Computational Outlook.ACS central science · 2021Article
- Time-resolved comparative molecular evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis.Biochimica et biophysica acta. Bioenergetics · 2021Article
- In search of the RNA world on Mars.Geobiology · 2021Article
- The Dissipative Photochemical Origin of Life: UVC Abiogenesis of Adenine.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- A Mini Review on Discovery and Synthesis of Remdesivir as an Effective and Promising Drug against COVID-19.Russian journal of bioorganic chemistry · 2021Article
20 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
High-temperature origin-of-life theories require that the components of the first genetic material are stable. We therefore have measured the half-lives for the decomposition of the nucleobases. They have been found to be short on the geologic time scale. At 100 degreesC, the growth temperatures of the hyperthermophiles, the half-lives are too short to allow for the adequate accumulation of these compounds (t1/2 for A and G approximately 1 yr; U = 12 yr; C = 19 days). Therefore, unless the origin of life took place extremely rapidly (<100 yr), we conclude that a high-temperature origin of life may be possible, but it cannot involve adenine, uracil, guanine, or cytosine. The rates of hydrolysis at 100 degreesC also suggest that an ocean-boiling asteroid impact would reset the prebiotic clock, requiring prebiotic synthetic processes to begin again. At 0 degreesC, A, U, G, and T appear to be sufficiently stable (t1/2 >/= 10(6) yr) to be involved in a low-temperature origin of life. However, the lack of stability of cytosine at 0 degreesC (t1/2 = 17, 000 yr) raises the possibility that the GC base pair may not have been used in the first genetic material unless life arose quickly (<10(6) yr) after a sterilization event. A two-letter code or an alternative base pair may have been used instead.
Indexed as
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.