Chemical structure of a prebiotic analog of adenosine.

Upon heating a dry mixture of ribose and adenine, condensation products are formed. They were identified as isomers of N6-ribosyl-adenine (Fuller, Sanchez and Orgel, 1972). Due to the current interest in nucleotide analogs as potential constituents of primitive RNA catalysts, the products were further characterized by mass spectroscopy and proton NMR. Our results fully substantiate the previous proposals.