Following on the heels of yesterday’s post concerning abiogenesis, an article published in Nature Communications titled: Divergent prebiotic synthesis of pyrimidine and 8-oxo-purine ribonucleotides makes to bold claim of providing a potential mechanism to prebiotic RNA synthesis: the synthesis of RNA in the absence of biological organisms.

If you’re familiar with abiogenesis theories and hypotheses, you can feel free to skip this paragraph, as I’ll offer a brief explanation. Abiogenesis is the mechanism whereby life arises from non living chemicals, and is one of the most difficult questions to address in biology/biochemistry. There are a variety of different hypotheses surrounding how abiogenesis might have occurred, though a detailed discussion of these mechanisms is out of the scope of this post. The two main competing theories of abiogenesis are the RNA world hypothesis and the metabolism first hypothesis. RNA world proponents tend to find this idea appealing, as RNA is capable of retaining and transmitting biological information, as well as catalyzing it’s own synthesis. Recall that DNA stores biological information in a chemical form. RNA is the sister molecule to DNA, and provides a transcript for the synthesis of the cell’s working molecules, proteins. Thus RNA can function in place of both DNA and protein, theoretically. In contrast, proponents of the metabolism first hypothesis tend to believe that RNA is too complicated of a molecule to have arisen on its own, and required the development of some crude metabolic activities to direct the synthesis of RNA and other biological molecules.
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