The DOI matches its Crossref record; 7 of the 7 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Understanding Nucleic Acids Using Synthetic Chemistry
Abstract
This Account describes work done in these laboratories that has used synthetic, physical organic, and biological chemistry to understand the roles played by the nucleobases, sugars, and phosphates of DNA in the molecular recognition processes central to genetics. The number of nucleobases has been increased from 4 to 12, generating an artificially expanded genetic information system. This system is used today in the clinic to monitor the levels of HIV and hepatitis C viruses in patients, helping to manage patient care. Work with uncharged phosphate replacements suggests that a repeating charge is a universal feature of genetic molecules operating in water and will be found in extraterrestrial life (if it is ever encountered). The use of ribose may reflect prebiotic processes in the presence of borate-containing minerals, which stabilize ribose formed from simple organic precursors. A new field, synthetic biology, is emerging on the basis of these experiments, where chemistry mimics biological processes as complicated as Darwinian evolution.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Isolation of New Ribozymes from a Large Pool of Random Sequences
Bartel, D. P., & Szostak, J. W. (1993) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.7690155 · Cited by 900
Chemical etiology of nucleic acid structure
Eschenmoser, A. (1999) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.284.5423.2118 · Cited by 611
Modern metabolism as a palimpsest of the RNA world
Benner, S. A., Ellington, A. D., & Tauer, A. (1989) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.86.18.7054 · Cited by 478
Self-citationThe case for an ancestral genetic system involving simple analogues of the nucleotides.
Joyce, G. F., Schwartz, A. W., Miller, S. L., & Orgel, L. E. (1987) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.84.13.4398 · Cited by 387
Rates of decomposition of ribose and other sugars - implications for chemical evolution
Larralde, R., Robertson, M. P., & Miller, S. L. (1995) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.92.18.8158 · Cited by 344
Nucleobase Pairing in Expanded Watson-Crick-like Genetic Information Systems
Geyer, C. R., Battersby, T. R., & Benner, S. A. (2003) · Structure · doi:10.1016/j.str.2003.11.008 · Cited by 159
Self-citationWhat is the optimum size for the genetic alphabet?
Szathmáry, E. (1992) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.89.7.2614 · Cited by 50
Cited by
Prebiotic Systems Chemistry: New Perspectives for the Origins of Life
Ruiz-Mirazo, K., Briones, C., & de la Escosura, A. (2014) · Chemical Reviews · doi:10.1021/cr2004844 · Cited by 930
Benner, S. A., & Sismour, A. M. (2005) · Nature Reviews Genetics · doi:10.1038/nrg1637 · Cited by 834
Self-citationOrigins of building blocks of life: A review
Kitadai, N., & Maruyama, S. (2018) · Geoscience Frontiers · doi:10.1016/j.gsf.2017.07.007 · Cited by 464
Is there a common chemical model for life in the universe?
Benner, S. A., Ricardo, A., & Carrigan, M. A. (2004) · Current Opinion in Chemical Biology · doi:10.1016/j.cbpa.2004.10.003 · Cited by 363
Self-citationThe Drive to Life on Wet and Icy Worlds
Russell, M. J., Barge, L. M., Bhartia, R., Bocanegra, D., Bracher, P. J., Branscomb, E., Kidd, R., McGlynn, S., Meier, D. H., Nitschke, W., et al. (2014) · Astrobiology · doi:10.1089/ast.2013.1110 · Cited by 288
“ATP drives all these condensations today (Goodwin and Lynn, 1992; Benner, 2004), but at the emergence of life, pyrophosphate—presumed to have been produced in protoH + pyrophosphatases—may have fulfilled the same role (Yamanaka et al. 1988; Russell and Hall, 1997; Yamagata and Inomata, 1997;…”
Metadata
- Authors
- Benner, S. A.
- Venue
- Accounts of Chemical Research
- Publisher
- American Chemical Society (ACS)
- Published
- 2004-08-31
- Volume
- 37
- Issue
- 10
- Pages
- 784-797
- ISSN
- 0001-4842 (ISSN-L)
- 1520-4898
- OpenAlex
- W2164903159
- Cited by
- 379
- References
- 7
- FWCI
- 4.05
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Understanding Nucleic Acids Using Synthetic Chemistry. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1021/ar040004z
- The paper
- Benner, S. A. (2004). Understanding Nucleic Acids Using Synthetic Chemistry. Accounts of Chemical Research. https://doi.org/10.1021/ar040004z
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
