Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

Organic chemists have created in the lab the nucleobases, adenine, uracil, cytosine and guanine — known as A, U, C and G — that could have served as the building blocks of RNA on an early Earth. The team put basic molecules through a series of conditions that could have existed way back when — cycling them from wet to dry, from hot to cold, and from acidic to basic, with chemicals occasionally flowing between two ponds. The results add credence to the idea that life arose from self-replicating, RNA-based genes before organisms developed the ability to store genetic information in the molecule’s close relative, DNA.