Japan Geoscience Union Meeting 2015

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International Session (Oral)

Symbol B (Biogeosciences) » B-AO Astrobiology & the Origin of Life

[B-AO01] Astrobiology: Origins, Evolution, Distribution of Life

Thu. May 28, 2015 4:15 PM - 6:00 PM 105 (1F)

Convener:*Kensei Kobayashi(Department of Chemistry and Biotechnology, Faculty of Engineering, Yokohama National University), Akihiko Yamagishi(Tokyo University of Pharmacy and Life Science, Department of Molecular Biology), Masatoshi Ohishi(Astronomy Data Center, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan), Eiichi Tajika(Department of Complexity Science and Engineering, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo), Takeshi Kakegawa(Graduate School of Science, Tohoku University), Shigeru Ida(Department of Earth and Planetary Science, Graduate School of Science and Technology, Tokyo Institute of Technology), Chair:Takeshi Kakegawa(Graduate School of Science, Tohoku University), Shigeru Ida(Department of Earth and Planetary Science, Graduate School of Science and Technology, Tokyo Institute of Technology)

4:30 PM - 4:45 PM

[BAO01-13] Polypeptide formation from oligopeptides

*Toratane MUNEGUMI1 (1.Department of Science Education, Naruto University of Education)

Keywords:oligopeptides, polypeptides, asparagine, heating

Many scenarios for abiotic polypeptide formation have been proposed for many years, while the research results have shown that both the large peptides and the structure variety of those from amino acids are difficult. Deamidation of asparagine in aqueous solutions and dehydration of aspartic acid in dry conditions give polyaspartic acid upon heating. However, many other amino acids have some difficulties to occupy their residues in backbone structure of the polypeptides. The reason may be considered the diketopiperazine formation, which is carried out from usual linear dipeptides by intramolecular cyclization. This research focuses the polypeptide formation from the oligopeptides containing asparagine, which is an anomalous amino acid. Chemically synthesized dipeptides Gly-Asn, Ala-Asn were heated in the aqueous solution to afford polypeptides with the molecular weight of 3000 to 5000 Da. Asparagine can be produced in the simulative abiotic conditions. If oligopeptides containing asparagine residues had been obtained in the primordial conditions, these oligopeptides would have yielded polypeptides.