Writing in Wired Science, Brandon Keim, has reported: "University of Georgia chemists have modeled a key DNA ingredient's emergence from the primordial soup.
"The ingredient, adenine, (A purine base, C5H5N5, that is the constituent involved in base pairing with thymine in DNA and with uracil in RNA.) is one of four nucleotides that arose during the juvenile Earth's 1.5 billion years of lifeless chemical volatility, eventually combining to form the molecular building blocks necessary for life as we know it.
Adenine is a nucleobase (a purine derivative) with a variety of roles in biochemistry including cellular respiration, in the form of both the energy-rich adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and the cofactors nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) and flavin adenine dinucleotide (FAD), and protein synthesis, as a chemical component of DNA and RNA.[1] The shape of adenine is complementary to either thymine in DNA or uracil in RNA.
Keim continues: "Scientists have shown that adenine can be synthesized from large quantities of cyanide in volcano-like environments — something the early Earth had in abundance. But the molecular steps underlying this formation have remained a mystery.
"Enter the University of Georgia chemists, who ran several years of quantum chemical computations on possible cyanide reactions and formulations. The result, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: under the right conditions, just five cyanide molecules can combine to form adenine.
"So — good news for all you amateur origins-of-life-in-a-bottle enthusiasts out there! Now we just need to figure out thymine, cytosine and guanine."
Our complete suite of CRO services spans the entire molecule development pipeline including contract research for target identification, building blocks, compound synthesis, Adenine
ReplyDelete