Thymine and Other Prebiotic Molecules Produced from the Ultraviolet Photo-Irradiation of Pyrimidine in Simple Astrophysical Ice Analogs

Abstract

The informational subunits of RNA or DNA consist of substituted N-heterocyclic compounds that fall into two groups: those based on purine (C₅H₄N₄) (adenine and guanine) and those based on pyrimidine (C₄H₄N₂) (uracil, cytosine, and thymine). Although not yet detected in the interstellar medium, N-heterocycles, including the nucleobase uracil, have been reported in carbonaceous chondrites. Recent laboratory experiments and ab initio calculations have shown that the irradiation of pyrimidine in ices containing H₂O, NH₃, or both leads to the abiotic production of substituted pyrimidines, including the nucleobases uracil and cytosine. In this work, we studied the methylation and oxidation of pyrimidine in CH₃OH:pyrimidine, H₂O:CH₃OH:pyrimidine, CH₄:pyrimidine, and H₂O:CH₄:pyrimidine ices irradiated with UV photons under astrophysically relevant conditions. The nucleobase thymine was detected in the residues from some of the mixtures. Our results suggest that the abundance of abiotic thymine produced by ice photolysis and delivered to the early Earth may have been significantly lower than that of uracil. Insofar as the delivery of extraterrestrial molecules was important for early biological chemistry on early Earth, these results suggest that there was more uracil than thymine available for emergent life, a scenario consistent with the RNA world hypothesis. Key Words: Pyrimidine—Nucleobases—Interstellar ices—Cometary ices—Molecular processes—Prebiotic chemistry. Astrobiology 13, 948–962.