It’s plausible that carbohydrates formed on primordial Earth before amino acids. So say UK researchers who have shown that parent molecules to amino acids can catalyse the formation of 2-deoxy-D-ribose, a sugar found in the backbone of DNA.1
Source: Royal Society of Chemistry Amino nitriles can promote the enantioselective aldol reaction of formaldehyde and glycolaldehyde to yield D-glyceraldehyde, and the subsequent reaction of the D-glyceraldehyde with acetaldehyde to make 2-deoxy-D-ribose
We’ll never know the exact process that turned chemistry into biology, but many researchers want to get as close as they can to the truth. Paul Clarke at the University of York is one of those researchers.
Read the full story by Jennifer Newton on Chemistry World.
1 A M Steer et al, Chem. Commun., 2017, DOI: 10.1039/c7cc06083a (This paper is open access.)
