| Citation | ohn Sutherland is distinguished for his pioneering studies in understanding the chemical origins of life, one of the most profound questions in all of science. Developing a new “systems chemistry” approach, he has completed the first prebiotically plausible synthesis of activated pyrimidine nucleotides. The route used only four simple substrates, inorganic phosphate and urea as catalysts, and did not involve the well known problematic coupling of ribose to a heterocyclic base. Convinced by the inefficiency of the formose reaction, he developed a fundamentally new carbon-carbon bond forming reaction by consideration of the molecules and minerals present in a post meteor impact prebiotic world. This fascinating photo redox reaction mediated by cyanometallates uses hydrogen cyanide as the sole carbon atom source and hydrogen sulphide as a reducing agent. Sutherland's iterative reductive homologation chemistry has led not only to the glycolaldehyde (C2) and glyceraldehyde (C3) building blocks required for nucleotide synthesis, but also to the astonishing demonstration that the precursors to sugars, amino acids, lipids and even 2-deoxyribonucleotides can also be formed by the same chemistry. The resultant cyanosulfidic scenario is the first unifying theory which has been experimentally proven to demonstrate that all of the necessary subcellular precursors can be assembled simultaneously in a prebiotic world. |