The Krishnamurthy Lab

A Stitch in Time    

By Mark Schrope

Origin Of Life: The Search For The First Genetic Material

Looking Beyond the RNA Structural Neighborhood for Potentially Primordial Genetic Systems

By John Sutherland

For the original papers see

Mapping the Landscape of Potentially Primordial Informational Oligomers: Oligo-Dipeptides Tagged with 2,4-Disubstituted 5-amino-pyrimidines as Recognition Elements. Mittapalli, G.K.; Osornio, Y.M.; Guerrero, M.A.; Ravinder, K.R.; Krishnamurthy, R.; Eschenmoser, A. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2007, 46, 2478-2484.  

Mapping the Landscape of Potentially Primordial Informational Oligomers: Oligo-dipeptides and Oligo-dipeptoids Tagged with Triazines as Recognition Elements. Mittapalli, G.K.; Ravinder, K.R.; Xiong, H.; Munoz, O.; Han, B.; De Riccardis, De F.; Krishnamurthy, R.; Eschenmoser, A. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2007, 46, 2470-2477.

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Chemical & Engineering News, 2012-01-27

On The Origin Of Sugars

Prebiotic Chemistry: Experiments reveal a possible path to forming the sugar in RNA

By Mellisae Fellet 

Scripps Research Team Proves Plausibility of New Primordial Pathway to Life’s Chemical Building Blocks

Alternative Pathway Could Change the Field of Pre-life Chemistry

A New Pathway to Life's Origin

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Alternate Prebiotic Route to Sugars

in ACS Chemical Biology - Spotlight March 16, 2012 , Volume 7, Issue 3, Pages 421-614

By Sarah A. Webb, Ph.D.

Researchers have struggled to uncover the chemical mechanisms that could have converted an abiotic “primordial soup” into building blocks of biopolymers. In examining the formation of carbohydrates from fundamental components such as water and carbon dioxide, researchers initially proposed the formose reaction that converts formaldehyde to a mixture of aldoses and ketoses in a series of steps.

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JACS Image Challenge

Challenge #184

The article reported experimental investigations on the reactions of dihydroxyfumarate with small molecule aldehydes (glyoxylate, glycolaldehyde, and glyceraldehyde). Which pathway actually accounts for the formation of a mixture of diastereomers of pentulosonic acid 3a+3b from glyoxylate?

For the answer see http://pubs.acs.org/JACSbeta/challenge/index.html challenge # 184

Exploratory Experiments on the Chemistry of the "Glyoxylate Scenario": Formation of Ketosugars from Dihydroxyfumarate. Sagi, V.N.; Punna, V.; Hu, F.; Meher, G.; Krishnamurthy, R. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2012, 134, pp 3577–3589 

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http://www.nature.com/news/life-changing-experiments-the-biological-higgs-1.10310

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http://www.nature.com/news/enzymes-grow-artificial-dna-1.10487

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Discovery of DNA Structure and Function: Watson and Crick