The chemical world has been buzzing about the recent article describing how chemists were able to synthesize pantethiene using chemicals that were likely available on the early Earth.
Pantethiene is not a brand of cosmetics and hair care products. Here are the supremely simple basics:
"The compound, pantetheine, is the active fragment of Coenzyme A. It is important for metabolism – the chemical processes that maintain life."
Be aware that it's not just that pantethiene was important for those early reactions; it's currently a basic part of cellular metabolism now.
So, it got made.
Birth of Life’s Building Blocks: New Study Synthesizes Key Compound in Lab
(I like this article because it includes a link to the actual reference.)
"A notable earlier attempt to synthesize pantetheine was made in 1995 by the late American chemist Stanley Miller, who had started the field of origin of life experiments three decades earlier, creating amino acids from four simple chemicals in glass tubes.I was curious what pantethiene "looks" like; the molecule is shown below. If you don't immediately recognize the name (or the molecule), you might be more familiar with pantothenic acid, aka vitamin B5. And what does the vitamin do? "The main function of this water-soluble B vitamin is in the synthesis of coenzyme A (CoA) and acyl carrier protein."
However, in the later 1995 experiment, the yields of pantetheine were very low and required extremely high concentrations of chemicals that had been dried out and sealed in an airtight tube before they were heated to 100 degrees Centigrade.
Dr. Jasper Fairchild (UCL Chemistry), a lead author of the study, who conducted the work as part of his PhD, said: “The major difference between Miller’s study and ours is whereas Miller tried to use acid chemistry, we used nitriles. It’s the nitriles that bring the energy and the selectivity. Our reactions just run in water and produce high yields of pantetheine with relatively low concentrations of chemicals needed.”
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