Evidence against an Alternative Mechanism for a Self-Replicating System

Article abstract of DOI:10.1021/jo00129a046

A recent paper by Menger et al. described experimental and computational work related to our self-replicating system and concluded that amide catalysis - either external or internal - is the cause of observed rate enhancements.Herein we show that the proporsal of Menger et al. is inconsistent with published data, that their conclusions overreach the data afforded by their experiments, and that the step which they modeled is likely irrelevant to the autocatalytic nature of the system.We present new results and a refined mechanism in which the transition state is stabilized not by amides but by template-based recognition, the hallmark of self-replicating systems.