Isoxazole Nucleosides as Building Blocks for a Plausible Proto-RNA

The question of how RNA, as the principal carrier of genetic information evolved is fundamentally important for our understanding of the origin of life. The RNA molecule is far too complex to have formed in one evolutionary step, suggesting that ancestral proto-RNAs (first ancestor of RNA) may have existed, which evolved over time into the RNA of today. Here we show that isoxazole nucleosides, which are quickly formed from hydroxylamine, cyanoacetylene, urea and ribose, are plausible precursors for RNA. The isoxazole nucleoside can rearrange within an RNA-strand to give cytidine, which leads to an increase of pairing stability. If the proto-RNA contains a canonical seed-nucleoside with defined stereochemistry, the seed-nucleoside can control the configuration of the anomeric center that forms during the in-RNA transformation. The results demonstrate that RNA could have emerged from evolutionarily primitive precursor isoxazole ribosides after strand formation.