oa Origin of Life Building Blocks Under Early Earth Conditions

Life is thought to have emerged in the Hadean eon (4.6-4 million years ago). It is assumed that in a first step reactive feedstock molecules available from the atmosphere reacted to biomolecules such as nucleotides and aminoacids, which then could have condensed towards biopolymers such as DNA, RNA and proteins. But it remains unclear, how these reactive feedstock molecules through which the molecules could have formed under the conditions of the early Earth, which are assumed to have been weakly reducing. Here we report that simple molecules such as formaldehyde and nitrite, which form robustly in a weakly reducing atmosphere through lightning and UV-irradiation, react with SO2 from volcanic sources towards a set of oxime-, amidoxime- and nitrile-containing feedstock molecules, which react to amino acids and all four nucleosides.