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.
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