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Alizarin Red S. displays a dramatic change in fluorescence intensity and color in response to the binding of a boronic acid and can be used as a general reporter for studying carbohydrate-boronic acid interactions, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Observations regarding the catalytic potential of RNA and the role of RNA in biology have formed the basis for the "RNA world" hypothesis, which suggests that a genetic system based on self-replicating polyribonucleotides preceded modern biology. However, attempts to devise a realistic prebiotic synthesis of nucleic acids from simple starting materials have been plagued by problems of poor chemical selectivity, lack of stereo- and regiospecificity, and similar rates of formation and degradation of some of the key intermediates. For example, ribose would have been only a small component of a highly complex mix of sugars resulting from the condensation of formaldehyde in a prebiotic world. In addition, ribose is more reactive and degrades more rapidly compared with most other monosaccharides. This study demonstrates an approach for the preferential sequestration of ribose relative to other sugars that takes advantage of its greater reactivity. Cyanamide reacts especially rapidly with ribose to form a stable bicyclic adduct. This product crystallizes spontaneously in aqueous solution, whereas the corresponding products derived from threose, galactose, glucose, mannose, and each of the other pentoses do not. Furthermore, when employing a racemic mixture of d- and l-ribose, enantiomerically twinned crystals are formed that contain discrete homochiral domains.

A step-by-step mechanistic pathway following the transformation of formamide to purine through a five-membered ring intermediate has been explored by density functional theory computations. The highlight of the mechanistic route detailed here is that the proposed pathway represents the simplest reaction pathway. All necessary reactants are generated from a single starting compound, formamide, through energetically viable reactions. Several important reaction steps are involved in this mechanistic route: formylation-dehydration, Leuckart reduction, five- and six-membered ring-closure, and deamination. On the basis of the study of noncatalytic pathways, catalytic water has been found to provide energetically viable step-by-step mechanistic pathways. Among these reaction steps, five-member ring-closure is the rate-determining step. The energy barrier (ca. 42 kcal/mol) of this rate-control step is somewhat lower than the rate-determining step (ca. 44 kcal/mol) for a pyrimidine-based pathway reported previously. The mechanistic pathway reported herein is less energetically demanding than for previously proposed routes to adenine.

What were the physico-chemical forces that drove the origins of life? We discuss four major prebiotic 'discoveries': persistent sampling of chemical reaction space; sequence-encodable foldable catalysts; assembly of functional pathways; and encapsulation and heritability. We describe how a 'proteinsfirst' world gives plausible mechanisms. We note the importance of hydrophobic and polar compositions of matter in these advances.

The development of metabolic approaches towards understanding the origins of life, which have focused mainly on the citric acid (TCA) cycle, have languished—primarily due to a lack of experimentally demonstrable and sustainable cycle(s) of reactions. We show here the existence of a protometabolic analog of the TCA involving two linked cycles, which convert glyoxylate into CO2 and produce aspartic acid in the presence of ammonia. The reactions proceed from either pyruvate, oxaloacetate or malonate in the presence of glyoxylate as the carbon source and hydrogen peroxide as the oxidant under neutral aqueous conditions and at mild temperatures. The reaction pathway demonstrates turnover under controlled conditions. These results indicate that simpler versions of metabolic cycles could have emerged under potential prebiotic conditions, laying the foundation for the appearance of more sophisticated metabolic pathways once control by (polymeric) catalysts became available.

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