Inevitability of nTP: information — energy carriers

Abstract

Adenine is naturally selected as the main energy carrier from among two types of purines. C. Duve mentions that the inevitability of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is still a mystery. We examined the databases of DNA, RNA, and codon in order to clarify whether guanosine triphosphate (GTP) is mainly used for information storage in nucleic acids, because the adenine-uracil pair with a weaker connection would be dropped out relatively among the information carrier candidates due to natural selection. This paper presents a simple hypothesis that the relatively lower rates of adenine (A) and uracil (U) than the rates of guanine (G) and cytosine (C) observed in the RNAs for a lot of species cause redundant monomers of ATP and uridine triphosphate (UTP) outside nucleic acids, which become energy carriers. ATP runoff from RNA resembles the joker (or remaining unmatched queen) in the card game of Old Maid. The other redundant monomers of UTP might become polysaccharide generators. Actual frequencies of G and C in the RNAs of hyper-thermophiles are more than double those of A and U. A-U pairs are also fewer in number than G-C pairs in microorganisms such as yeast.