Phosphorylation, oligomerization and self-assembly in water under potential prebiotic conditions
Clémentine Gibard, Subhendu Bhowmik, Megha Karki, Eun-Kyong Kim & Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy
Nature Chemistry
doi:10.1038/nchem.2878
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Chemical biology Organic chemistry Chemical origin of life
Received: 14 April 2017 Accepted: 22 September 2017
Published online: 06 November 2017
Source/Fonte: Nature
Abstract
Prebiotic phosphorylation of (pre)biological substrates under aqueous conditions is a critical step in the origins of life. Previous investigations have had limited success and/or require unique environments that are incompatible with subsequent generation of the corresponding oligomers or higher-order structures. Here, we demonstrate that diamidophosphate (DAP)—a plausible prebiotic agent produced from trimetaphosphate—efficiently (amido)phosphorylates a wide variety of (pre)biological building blocks (nucleosides/tides, amino acids and lipid precursors) under aqueous (solution/paste) conditions, without the need for a condensing agent. Significantly, higher-order structures (oligonucleotides, peptides and liposomes ) are formed under the same phosphorylation reaction conditions. This plausible prebiotic phosphorylation process under similar reaction conditions could enable the systems chemistry of the three classes of (pre)biologically relevant molecules and their oligomers, in a single-pot aqueous environment.
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