A7: Evolutionary organocatalyst – Riboglycosides (Oliver Trapp)
The goal of this project is to investigate a hitherto unknown level of prebiotic chemistry, namely the organocatalytic and evolutionary properties of imidazolidine-4-thiones, which are formed in excellent yields under prebiotic conditions from the simplest aldehyde building blocks. This project will investigate the modification of such imidazolidine-4-thiones with (deoxy)-ribosyl units, analogous to DNA/RNA, to synthesize RNA/DNA nucleoside amino acid chimeras under prebiotic conditions. The catalytic and information storing properties of these organocatalyst riboglycoside chimeras will be studied in detail.