Electric discharge synthesis

TABLE IV. Relative Abundances of Amino Acids in the Murchison Meteorite and in an Electric Discharge Synthesis"... 

Table 4.1. Relative abundance of amino acids in the Murchison meteorite and in an electric discharge synthesis...

Stanley Miller at the University of Chicago more than 50 years ago. This experiment (in fact, of course, many were carried out prior to the successful one) is probably as well known as the Wohler synthesis of urea Miller s doctoral supervisor, Harold Urey (winner of the Nobel Prize in 1934), had suggested to Miller that he simulate a reducing primeval Earth atmosphere (as required by the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis) to electrical discharges and see what happens . Urey apparently expected that such an experiment would lead to a huge variety of organic compounds. 

Many years later, Schwartz (Schwartz and Goverde, 1982 Voet and Schwartz, 1983) discovered that the synthesis of adenine via polymerisation of HCN can be accelerated by adding formaldehyde and other aldehydes. Reactions in the gas phase (nitrogen/methane atmosphere) promoted by electrical discharges led to the formation of cyanoacetylene in relatively good yields the latter reacts with urea to give various products, including cytosine (Sanchez et al., 1968). 

The many successful simulation experiments indicate that electrical discharges on prebiotic Earth may have been involved in the synthesis of biomolecules. However, we simply do not know how important they actually were Studies of energy... 

The assignment of the earth/moon system to one precursor nebular reservoir, and meteorites to a second, while still logically possible, was shown experimentally to be unnecessary by Thiemens and coworkers (reading list). In the early 1980s these workers studied isotope fractionation during the synthesis of ozone from molecular oxygen in an electric discharge operated at low pressure. The product ozone was... 

Digermanium hexachloride, synthesis in electric discharge, 6 173, 272 Diglycolic acid, complex formation by, 3 276 Digold heteronuclear cluster compounds. X-ray crystallography, 39 358-362... 

Organosilicon compounds (continued) synthesis of in electric discharges, 6 165-167... 

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