Abstract
Novel density functional theory calculations are presented regarding a mechanism for prebiotic amino acid synthesis from alpha-keto acids that was suggested to happen via catalysis by dinucleotide species. Our results were analysed with comparison to the original hypothesis (Copley et al., PNAS, 2005, 102, 4442–4447). It was shown that the keto acid–dinucleotide hypothesis for possible prebiotic amino acid synthesis was plausible based on an initial computational analysis, and details of the structures for the intermediates and transition states showed that there was wide scope for interactions between the keto acid and dinucleotide moieties that could affect the free energy profiles and lead to the required proto-metabolic selectivity.
Highlights
The question of how life exactly originated on Earth has always been one of the most persistent scientific and philosophical questions
To make an amino acid, this should be an imine with no substituent on nitrogen
To make an amino acid, this should be an imine with no substituent on nitrogen (RR’C=NH or Himine) but these are known to be unstable [50]
Summary
The question of how life exactly originated on Earth has always been one of the most persistent scientific and philosophical questions. For the modern scientific world, maybe the most important part of the puzzle is abiogenesis, which is the formation of life from inanimate objects. Oparin [1] and John Haldane [2], with their suggestions on the topic being very similar such that the combination of their ideas was named the Oparin–Haldane Hypothesis. This consisted in suggesting that at some time on Earth, probably at very early times, life originated from prebiotic chemical reactions that occurred in a “primordial soup”. Recent years saw a surge of experimental [5,6,7,8,9], computational [10] and combined experimental–computational [11,12,13,14] papers about prebiotic nucleic acids and their synthesis, and the field has largely expanded its knowledge base
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