Editing Nucleoside (section)

==Prebiotic synthesis of ribonucleosides==

In order to understand how [[life]] arose, knowledge is required of the chemical pathways that permit formation of the key building blocks of life under plausible [[abiogenesis|prebiotic conditions]].  According to the [[RNA world]] hypothesis free-floating ribonucleosides and ribonucleotides were present in the primitive soup. Molecules as complex as RNA must have arisen from small molecules whose reactivity was governed by physico-chemical processes.  RNA is composed of [[purine]] and [[pyrimidine]] nucleotides, both of which are necessary for reliable information transfer, and thus Darwinian natural selection and [[evolution]]. Nam et al.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Nam |first1=Inho |last2=Nam |first2=Hong Gil |last3=Zare |first3=Richard N. |date=2018-01-02 |title=Abiotic synthesis of purine and pyrimidine ribonucleosides in aqueous microdroplets |journal=Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America |volume=115 |issue=1 |pages=36–40 |doi=10.1073/pnas.1718559115 |pmc=5776833 |pmid=29255025|bibcode=2018PNAS..115...36N |doi-access=free }}</ref> demonstrated the direct condensation of nucleobases with ribose to give ribonucleosides in aqueous microdroplets, a key step leading to RNA formation. Also, a plausible prebiotic process for synthesizing pyrimidine and purine ribonucleosides and ribonucleotides using wet-dry cycles was presented by Becker et al.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Becker |first1=Sidney |last2=Feldmann |first2=Jonas |last3=Wiedemann |first3=Stefan |last4=Okamura |first4=Hidenori |last5=Schneider |first5=Christina |last6=Iwan |first6=Katharina |last7=Crisp |first7=Antony |last8=Rossa |first8=Martin |last9=Amatov |first9=Tynchtyk |last10=Carell |first10=Thomas |date=2019-10-04 |title=Unified prebiotically plausible synthesis of pyrimidine and purine RNA ribonucleotides |journal=Science |volume=366 |issue=6461 |pages=76–82 |doi=10.1126/science.aax2747 |pmid=31604305|bibcode=2019Sci...366...76B |s2cid=203719976 |url=https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/71503/1/Science_Becker_2019.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/71503/1/Science_Becker_2019.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-09 |url-status=live }}</ref>