Prebiotic Peptide Bond Formation Through Amino Acid Phosphorylation. Insights from Quantum Chemical Simulations.

ABSTRACT: Condensation reactions between biomolecular building blocks are the main synthetic channels to build biopolymers. However, under highly diluted prebiotic conditions, condensations are thermodynamically hampered since they release water. Moreover, these reactions are also kinetically hindered as, in the absence of any catalyst, they present high activation energies. In living organisms, in the formation of peptides by condensation of amino acids, this issue is overcome by the participation of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), in which, previous to the condensation, phosphorylation of one of the reactants is carried out to convert it as an activated intermediate. In this work, we present for the first time results based on density functional theory (DFT) calculations on the peptide bond formatio

SUBMITTER: Martinez-Bachs B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6789625 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature