141-90-2Relevant articles and documents
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Ziegler et al.
, p. 1546 (1958)
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Prebiotic phosphorylation of 2-thiouridine provides either nucleotides or DNA building blocks via photoreduction
Xu, Jianfeng,Green, Nicholas J.,Gibard, Clémentine,Krishnamurthy, Ramanarayanan,Sutherland, John D.
, p. 457 - 462 (2019/04/08)
Breakthroughs in the study of the origin of life have demonstrated how some of the building blocks essential to biology could have been formed under various primordial scenarios, and could therefore have contributed to the chemical evolution of life. Missing building blocks are then sometimes inferred to be products of primitive biosynthesis, which can stretch the limits of plausibility. Here, we demonstrate the synthesis of 2′-deoxy-2-thiouridine, and subsequently 2′-deoxyadenosine and 2-deoxyribose, under prebiotic conditions. 2′-Deoxy-2-thiouridine is produced by photoreduction of 2,2′-anhydro-2-thiouridine, which is in turn formed by phosphorylation of 2-thiouridine—an intermediate of prebiotic RNA synthesis. 2′-Deoxy-2-thiouridine is an effective deoxyribosylating agent and may have functioned as such in either abiotic or proto-enzyme-catalysed pathways to DNA, as demonstrated by its conversion to 2′-deoxyadenosine by reaction with adenine, and 2-deoxyribose by hydrolysis. An alternative prebiotic phosphorylation of 2-thiouridine leads to the formation of its 5′-phosphate, showing that hypotheses in which 2-thiouridine was a key component of early RNA sequences are within the bounds of synthetic credibility.
A prebiotically plausible synthesis of pyrimidine β-ribonucleosides and their phosphate derivatives involving photoanomerization
Xu, Jianfeng,Tsanakopoulou, Maria,Magnani, Christopher J.,Szabla, Rafa?,?poner, Judit E.,?poner, Ji?í,Góra, Robert W.,Sutherland, John D.
, p. 303 - 309 (2017/04/03)
Previous research has identified ribose aminooxazoline as a potential intermediate in the prebiotic synthesis of the pyrimidine nucleotides with remarkable properties. It crystallizes spontaneously from reaction mixtures, with an enhanced enantiomeric excess if initially enantioenriched, which suggests that reservoirs of this compound might have accumulated on the early Earth in an optically pure form. Ribose aminooxazoline can be converted efficiently into α-ribocytidine by way of 2,2'-anhydroribocytidine, although anomerization to β-ribocytidine by ultraviolet irradiation is extremely inefficient. Our previous work demonstrated the synthesis of pyrimidine β-ribonucleotides, but at the cost of ignoring ribose aminooxazoline, using arabinose aminooxazoline instead. Here we describe a long-sought route through ribose aminooxazoline to the pyrimidine β-ribonucleosides and their phosphate derivatives that involves an extraordinarily efficient photoanomerization of α-2-thioribocytidine. In addition to the canonical nucleosides, our synthesis accesses β-2-thioribouridine, a modified nucleoside found in transfer RNA that enables both faster and more-accurate nucleic acid template-copying chemistry.
