Prebiotically Plausible Chemoselective Pantetheine Synthesis in Water
Matthew Powner investigated on the emergence of pantetheine from prebiotic chemistry.
Pantetheine is the functional unit within coenzyme A (CoA). It is essential to all known life and, for example, is required in autotrophic carbon fixation pathways, energy metabolism, the citric acid cycle, and protein modification, as well as fat-ty acid, polyketide, isoprenoid, hemoglobin, cytochrome, and peptide biosyntheses. Therefore, not surprisingly, pantetheine is central to many different origins-of-life scenarios and may hold the key to uniting several ‘leading’ conceptual models for the origins of life, including the ‘RNA-’, the ‘Peptide-’, and the ‘Thioester-World’ hypotheses. But how and why pantetheine would emerge from prebiotic chemistry was a mystery, which was recently investigated by Professor Matthew Powner’s group at University College London (UK).
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