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Article
Racemization of Valine by Impact-Induced Heating
Homochirality plays an important role in all living organisms but its origin remains unclear. It also remains unclear whether such chiral molecules survived terrestrial heavy impact events. Impacts of extrater...
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Article
Effects of Glycine, Water, Ammonia, and Ammonium Bicarbonate on the Oligomerization of Methionine
The abiotic oligomerization of amino acids may have created primordial, protein-like biological catalysts on the early Earth. Previous studies have proposed and evaluated the potential of diagenesis for the am...
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Article
Effects of Silicate, Phosphate, and Calcium on the Stability of Aldopentoses
Ribose is an important constituent of RNA: ribose connects RNA bases and forms a strand of sugar phosphates. Accumulation of ribose on prebiotic Earth was difficult because of its low stability. Improvement in...
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Article
Selective Stabilization of Ribose by Borate
In this study, borate was found to selectively increase the stability of ribose over other aldopentoses. Ribose is the only sugar present in both early RNA-based biochemistry and contemporary DNA-based life, a...
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Article
Abiotic Formation of Valine Peptides Under Conditions of High Temperature and High Pressure
We investigated the oligomerization of solid valine and the stabilities of valine and valine peptides under conditions of high temperature (150–200 °C) and high pressure (50–150 MPa). Experiments were performe...