Prebiotic synthesis of dihydrouridine by photoreduction of uridine in formamide.

In this report, we show that a very common modification (especially in tRNA), dihydrouridine, was efficiently produced by photoreduction of the canonical pyrimidine ribonucleoside, uridine in formamide. Formamide not only acts as a solvent in this reaction, but also as the reductant. The other three components of the canonical alphabet (C, A, G) remained intact under the same conditions, suggesting that dihydrouridine might have coexisted with all four canonical RNA nucleosides (C, U, A, G) at the dawn of life.