Prebiotic synthesis of α-amino acids and orotate from α-ketoacids potentiates transition to extant metabolic pathways.

The Strecker reaction of aldehydes is the pre-eminent pathway to explain the prebiotic origins of α-amino acids. However, biology employs transamination of α-ketoacids to synthesize amino acids which are then transformed to nucleobases, implying an evolutionary switch-abiotically or biotically-of a prebiotic pathway involving the Strecker reaction into today's biosynthetic pathways. Here we show that α-ketoacids react with cyanide and ammonia sources to form the corresponding α-amino acids through the Bucherer-Bergs pathway. An efficient prebiotic transformation of oxaloacetate to aspartate via N-carbamoyl aspartate enables the simultaneous formation of dihydroorotate, paralleling the biochemical synthesis of orotate as the precursor to pyrimidine nucleobases. Glyoxylate forms both glycine and orotate and reacts with malonate and urea to form aspartate and dihydroorotate. These results, along with the previously demonstrated protometabolic analogues of the Krebs cycle, suggest that there can be a natural emergence of congruent forerunners of biological pathways with the potential for seamless transition from prebiotic chemistry to modern metabolism.

A Plausible Prebiotic One-Pot Synthesis of Orotate and Pyruvate Suggestive of Common Protometabolic Pathways.

A reaction between two prebiotically plausible building blocks, hydantoin and glyoxylate, generates both the nucleobase orotate, a precursor of biological pyrimidines, and pyruvate, a core metabolite in the citric acid cycle and amino acid biosynthesis. The reaction proceeds in water to provide significant yields of the two widely divergent chemical motifs. Additionally, the reaction of thiohydantoin and glyoxylate produces thioorotate in high yield under neutral aqueous conditions. The use of an open-chain thiohydantoin derivative also enables the potential pre-positioning of a nucleosidic bond prior to the synthesis of an orotate nucleoside. The observation that diverse building blocks of modern metabolism can be produced in a single reaction pot, from common reactants under mild conditions, supports the plausibility of orthogonal chemistries operating at the origins of chemical evolution.

A plausible metal-free ancestral analogue of the Krebs cycle composed entirely of α-ketoacids.

Efforts to decipher the prebiotic roots of metabolic pathways have focused on recapitulating modern biological transformations, with metals typically serving in place of cofactors and enzymes. Here we show that the reaction of glyoxylate with pyruvate under mild aqueous conditions produces a series of α-ketoacid analogues of the reductive citric acid cycle without the need for metals or enzyme catalysts. The transformations proceed in the same sequence as the reverse Krebs cycle, resembling a protometabolic pathway, with glyoxylate acting as both the carbon source and reducing agent. Furthermore, the α-ketoacid analogues provide a natural route for the synthesis of amino acids by transamination with glycine, paralleling the extant metabolic mechanisms and obviating the need for metal-catalysed abiotic reductive aminations. This emerging sequence of prebiotic reactions could have set the stage for the advent of increasingly sophisticated pathways operating under catalytic control.

The Messy Alkaline Formose Reaction and Its Link to Metabolism.

Sugars are essential for the formation of genetic elements such as RNA and as an energy/food source. Thus, the formose reaction, which autocatalytically generates a multitude of sugars from formaldehyde, has been viewed as a potentially important prebiotic source of biomolecules at the origins of life. When analyzing our formose solutions we find that many of the chemical species are simple carboxylic acids, including α-hydroxy acids, associated with metabolism. In this work we posit that the study of the formose reaction, under alkaline conditions and moderate hydrothermal temperatures, should not be solely focused on sugars for genetic materials, but should focus on the origins of metabolism (via metabolic molecules) as well.

Synthesis of 2-Thioorotidine and Comparison of Its Unusual Instability with Its Canonical Pyrimidine Counterparts.

2-Thiopyrimidine nucleosides exhibit properties that are interesting from both a biological/medicinal and origins of life chemistry point of view. We report here the first synthesis of the nucleoside 2-thioorotidine and our observations on its unexpected lability with respect to its N-glycosidic bond when compared with its corresponding canonical pyrimidine counterparts. We hypothesize that the cause of the lability of the N-glycosidic bond is due to the combined steric and electronic effects from the 2-thio- and the 6-carboxyl groups, a lability that could, in turn, be useful for further chemical transformations.

Linked cycles of oxidative decarboxylation of glyoxylate as protometabolic analogs of the citric acid cycle.

The development of metabolic approaches towards understanding the origins of life, which have focused mainly on the citric acid (TCA) cycle, have languished-primarily due to a lack of experimentally demonstrable and sustainable cycle(s) of reactions. We show here the existence of a protometabolic analog of the TCA involving two linked cycles, which convert glyoxylate into CO2 and produce aspartic acid in the presence of ammonia. The reactions proceed from either pyruvate, oxaloacetate or malonate in the presence of glyoxylate as the carbon source and hydrogen peroxide as the oxidant under neutral aqueous conditions and at mild temperatures. The reaction pathway demonstrates turnover under controlled conditions. These results indicate that simpler versions of metabolic cycles could have emerged under potential prebiotic conditions, laying the foundation for the appearance of more sophisticated metabolic pathways once control by (polymeric) catalysts became available.

Reaching Back to Jump Forward: Recent Efforts towards a Systems-Level Hypothesis for an Early RNA World.

In the spring of the world: Reductive homologation of cyanidic precursors creates the carbon scaffold for multiple classes of biologically relevant compounds. This chemistry underpins a scenario for the formation of a protometabolism on the way to an RNA world.

From formamide to adenine: a self-catalytic mechanism for an abiotic approach.

Mechanisms for abiotic reaction pathways from formamide (H2NCHO) to adenine are presented herein. Formamide is a simple C1 building block hypothesized to be a precursor to many protometabolic compounds. On the basis of a step-by-step mechanism of the reaction pathways, formamide is suggested to be more reactive in addition reactions than HCN. In addition to its simplicity, the formamide self-catalyzed mechanism is energetically (kinetically) more viable than either a water-catalyzed mechanism or noncatalyzed processes. Moreover, this self-catalyzed mechanism accounts for the yields of purine and adenine previously observed in experiments. This mechanism may elucidate processes that were vital for the emergence of life on the early earth.

From formamide to purine: a self-catalyzed reaction pathway provides a feasible mechanism for the entire process.

A formamide self-catalyzed mechanistic pathway that transforms formamide to purine through a five-membered ring intermediate has been explored by density functional theory calculations. The highlight of the mechanistic route detailed here is that the proposed pathway represents the simplest and lowest energy reaction pathway. All necessary reactants, including catalysts, are generated from a single initial compound, formamide. The most catalytically effective form of formamide is found to be the imidic acid isomer. The catalytic effect of formamide has been found to be much more significant than that of water. The self-catalytic mechanism revealed here provides a pathway with the lowest energy barriers among all reaction routes previously published. Several important reaction steps are involved in this mechanistic route: formylation-dehydration, Leuckart reduction, five- and six-member ring-closing, and deamination. Overall, a five-membered ring-closing is the rate-determining step in the present catalytic route, which is consistent with our previous mechanistic investigations. The activation energy of this rate-controlling step (ca. 27 kcal/mol) is significantly lower than the rate-determining step (ca. 34 kcal/mol) in the pathway from 4-aminoimidazole-5-carboxamidine described by Schleyer's group (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 2007, 104, 17272-17277) and in the pyrimidine pathway (ca. 44 kcal/mol) reported by Sponer et al. (J. Phys. Chem. A 2012, 116, 720-726). The self-catalyzed mechanistic pathway reported herein is less energetically demanding than previously proposed routes.

From formamide to purine: an energetically viable mechanistic reaction pathway.

A step-by-step mechanistic pathway following the transformation of formamide to purine through a five-membered ring intermediate has been explored by density functional theory computations. The highlight of the mechanistic route detailed here is that the proposed pathway represents the simplest reaction pathway. All necessary reactants are generated from a single starting compound, formamide, through energetically viable reactions. Several important reaction steps are involved in this mechanistic route: formylation-dehydration, Leuckart reduction, five- and six-membered ring-closure, and deamination. On the basis of the study of noncatalytic pathways, catalytic water has been found to provide energetically viable step-by-step mechanistic pathways. Among these reaction steps, five-member ring-closure is the rate-determining step. The energy barrier (ca. 42 kcal/mol) of this rate-control step is somewhat lower than the rate-determining step (ca. 44 kcal/mol) for a pyrimidine-based pathway reported previously. The mechanistic pathway reported herein is less energetically demanding than for previously proposed routes to adenine.

Conversion of a ribozyme to a deoxyribozyme through in vitro evolution.

An RNA ligase ribozyme was converted to a corresponding deoxyribozyme through in vitro evolution. The ribozyme was prepared as a DNA molecule of the same sequence, and had no detectable activity. A population of randomized variants of this DNA was constructed and evolved to perform RNA ligation at a rate similar to that of the starting ribozyme. When the deoxyribozyme was prepared as an RNA molecule of the same sequence, it had no detectable activity. Thus, the evolutionary transition from an RNA to a DNA enzyme represents a switch, rather than a broadening, of the chemical basis for catalytic function. This transfer of both information and function is relevant to the transition between two different genetic systems based on nucleic acid-like molecules, as postulated to have occurred during the early history of life on Earth.

Regulating the fluorescence intensity of an anthracene boronic acid system: a B-N bond or a hydrolysis mechanism?

An anthracene-based fluorescent boronic acid system developed by the Shinkai group has been widely used for the preparation of fluorescent sensors for carbohydrates. Such application is based on the significant fluorescence intensity increase of this system upon binding with a carbohydrate. The mechanism through which this fluorescence intensity change happens was originally proposed to go through a B-N bond formation mechanism, which masks the nitrogen lone pair electrons. However, our own fluorescence studies suggest a possible alternative mechanism for the fluorescence change upon the formation of a boronic acid (1a) complex with diols. In this new proposed mechanism, complex formation induces solvolysis, which results in the protonation of the amine nitrogen if the reactions are carried out in a protic solvent such as water. This protonation prevents the photoinduced electron transfer, resulting in reduced quenching of the anthracene fluorescence. Such a solvolysis mechanism is supported by evidence from various types of experiments and theoretical calculations.

Selective derivatization and sequestration of ribose from a prebiotic mix.

Observations regarding the catalytic potential of RNA and the role of RNA in biology have formed the basis for the "RNA world" hypothesis, which suggests that a genetic system based on self-replicating polyribonucleotides preceded modern biology. However, attempts to devise a realistic prebiotic synthesis of nucleic acids from simple starting materials have been plagued by problems of poor chemical selectivity, lack of stereo- and regiospecificity, and similar rates of formation and degradation of some of the key intermediates. For example, ribose would have been only a small component of a highly complex mix of sugars resulting from the condensation of formaldehyde in a prebiotic world. In addition, ribose is more reactive and degrades more rapidly compared with most other monosaccharides. This study demonstrates an approach for the preferential sequestration of ribose relative to other sugars that takes advantage of its greater reactivity. Cyanamide reacts especially rapidly with ribose to form a stable bicyclic adduct. This product crystallizes spontaneously in aqueous solution, whereas the corresponding products derived from threose, galactose, glucose, mannose, and each of the other pentoses do not. Furthermore, when employing a racemic mixture of d- and l-ribose, enantiomerically twinned crystals are formed that contain discrete homochiral domains.

The design of boronic acid spectroscopic reporter compounds by taking advantage of the pK(a)-lowering effect of diol binding: nitrophenol-based color reporters for diols.

The complex that forms between a boronic acid and a diol is often much more acidic than the starting boronic acid. In conditions where the solution pH is between the two pK(a) values, the boron atom will convert from a neutral trigonal form to an anionic tetrahedral form upon complexation. Such a change is likely to dramatically alter the electron density of neighboring groups. Utilizing this effect, we have designed and synthesized two nitrophenol-based boronic acid reporter compounds that change ionization states and therefore spectroscopic properties upon diol binding. Both compounds show significant UV changes upon addition of saccharides. For example, a blue shift of the absorption max from 373 to 332 nm was observed with the addition of D-fructose to 2-hydroxy-5-nitrophenylboronic acid at neutral pH. Such a reporter compound can be used as a recognition and signaling unit for the construction of polyboronic acid sensors for the selective and specific recognitions of saccharides of biological significance.

A novel type of fluorescent boronic acid that shows large fluorescence intensity changes upon binding with a carbohydrate in aqueous solution at physiological pH.

In this paper we report 8-quinolineboronic acid as a novel type of fluorescent probe for carbohydrates. This boronic acid responds to the binding of a carbohydrate with over 40-fold increases in fluorescence intensity and shows optimal fluorescence change at physiological pH in aqueous solution.