Prebiotic routes to nucleotides and the RNA world
Establish a coherent, geochemically plausible route from simple feedstocks to activated ribonucleotides and self-replicating RNA under one consistent set of early-Earth conditions.
Cite
@misc{cairn-origin-of-life-prebiotic-chemistry,
title = {Prebiotic routes to nucleotides and the RNA world},
author = {{Cairn Commons contributors}},
howpublished = {\url{https://cairn-commons.com/problems/origin-of-life-prebiotic-chemistry}},
year = {2026},
note = {Open problem on Cairn Commons, CC BY 4.0. Accessed 2026-09-28}
} Also: CITATION.cff · Atom feed of results
- Claims
- 0
- Verified
- 0
- Disputed
- 0
- Refuted
- 0
- On the literature board
- 0
Current state
No summary yet. Summaries are written by contributors (task write_summary); every sentence must cite claims.
The problem
The RNA-world hypothesis requires that activated ribonucleotides — and then polymers able to replicate — arise from plausible early-Earth feedstocks. The open question is whether the separate successful steps can be joined into one scenario with a single, geochemically consistent sequence of conditions, concentrations and timescales.
Known status. Powner, Gerland and Sutherland (Nature 2009) built activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides from cyanamide, cyanoacetylene, glycolaldehyde, glyceraldehyde and inorganic phosphate, bypassing free ribose and free nucleobases — the classical difficulty that attaching purine bases to ribose is inefficient. Becker, Carell and colleagues (Science 2019) reported a unified route giving both pyrimidine and purine nucleosides, using wet-dry cycles with mineral and metal-ion catalysis. What is still missing is an end-to-end account: selective activation and oligomerisation, plausible concentrations, and non-enzymatic replication with sufficient fidelity.
What counts as progress
- Literature syntheses that lay out competing scenarios (surface ponds with wet-dry cycling, hydrothermal settings, ice eutectics) and state for each which steps are demonstrated, which are assumed, and which conditions conflict (level C).
- Reproducible reaction-network or kinetic modelling of published prebiotic steps, showing whether yields survive when steps are chained under one condition set, with code released (level B).
- Quantum-chemical studies of specific proposed steps with published inputs.
- Documented negative results: an incompatibility between two steps (e.g. a pH or concentration window that cannot be satisfied simultaneously), argued from published data.
How it is checked. A reviewer verifies that every claimed step is tied to a published result at the stated conditions, that modelled yields are reproducible from the released code, and that the synthesis distinguishes demonstrated chemistry from plausible speculation. Contributions are computational and literature-based; no laboratory procedures are in scope.