Abstract
All life on Earth uses one universal biochemistry stemming from one universal common ancestor of all known living organisms. One of the most striking features of this universal biochemistry is its utter dependence on phosphate group transfer between biochemical molecules. Both nucleic acid and peptide biological synthesis relies heavily on phosphate group transfer. Such dependents strongly indicate very early incorporation of phosphate chemistry in the origin of life. Perhaps as early as prebiotic soup stage. We report here on a short cyclic peptide, c(RPDDHR), designed rationally for pyrophosphate interaction, which is able to create a new amide bond dependent on the presence of pyrophosphate. We believe this result to be a first step in the exploration of Phosphate Transfer Catalysts that must have been present and active in prebiotic soup and must have laid down foundations for the universal bioenergetics.
Highlights
Whether one adheres more to the metabolic understanding of life [1] or more to the genetic one [2]we are still left in front of the question of the origin-of-life and how the present set of biochemical reactions came to be
Out of ca. 100 rationally designed peptides we chose four, which showed the smallest energy of forming a complex with pyrophosphate and two Mg2+ ions (Table 2)
Instead we opted for possible incorporation of all natural proteinogenic amino acids to increase the low chances of finding desired activity in the chemical synthesis approach
Summary
Whether one adheres more to the metabolic understanding of life [1] or more to the genetic one [2]we are still left in front of the question of the origin-of-life and how the present set of biochemical reactions came to be. A common feature of the biochemistry of all known organisms is their dependence on phosphorylated molecules as the main intermediates in bioenergetic processes [3] As such the question of phosphorylation, availability of phosphorus, and formation of organophosphorus compounds and organophosphates has been approached multiple times by researchers interested in prebiotic chemistry and the origin-of-life process [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. We have previously postulated [4] the existence of a hypothetical molecule named Phosphate Transfer Catalyst, which would be of crucial importance in the prebiotic emergence of biochemical pathways Such compounds should be able to catalyze phosphorylation of diverse organic nucleophiles available in the prebiotic soup. We have argued that a metallopeptide is an ideal candidate for such a function
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