Re: Paper: prebiotic RNA synthesis?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227084.200-molecule-of-life-emerges-from-laboratory-slime.html
Molecule of Life Emerges From Laboratory Slime


CREATING life in the primordial soup may have been easier than we
thought. Two essential elements of RNA have finally been made from
scratch, under conditions similar to those that likely prevailed
during the dawn of life.

The question of how a molecule capable of storing genetic information
- even DNA's simpler cousin RNA - could ever have arisen spontaneously
in the primordial cooking pot has perplexed scientists for decades.
RNA consists of a long chain composed of four different types of
ribonucleotides, which each consist of a nitrogenous base, a sugar and
a phosphate.

Most people assumed that these three components first formed
separately, and then combined to make the ribonucleotides. The only
trouble was that it seemed impossible that two of the four bases with
particularly unwieldy chemistry ever reacted spontaneously with the
sugar.

To tackle this problem, John Sutherland from the University of
Manchester, UK, tried to work out a new recipe for RNA that gets by
without forcing isolated bases and sugar molecules to react. His team
experimented by cooking up ribonucleotides from five small molecules
thought to be present in the primordial soup. "We started with the
same building blocks as others, but take a different route,"
Sutherland says.

And this time the cooks seem to have got it right. The recipe and
conditions that they came up with to mix the five ingredients -
including a good blast of UV light - produce ribonucleotides via a
joint precursor molecule that contains both the base and the sugar
instead of making each in their free form (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/
nature08013).

This package deal sidesteps the problem of getting two unwilling
partners to react, but only thanks to another trick, say the
researchers. The reaction worked only when phosphate was present right
from the start, although it does not react with the mixture until near
the final stages. It turns out it is needed as a catalyst and as a
chemical buffer early on.

"We don't use any way-out scenarios - all the conditions are
consistent with what we know about early Earth," says Sutherland.
William Scott, from the University of California in Santa Cruz agrees:
"It's a great leap forward that demonstrates how prebiotic RNA
molecules may have assembled spontaneously from simple and presumably
relatively abundant constituents."


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