Whence Flavins? Redox-Active Ribonucleotides Link Metabolism and Genome Repair to the RNA World

Present-day organisms are under constant environmental stress that damages bases in DNA, leading to mutations. Without DNA repair processes to correct these errors, such damage would be catastrophic. Organisms in all kingdoms have repair processes ranging from direct reversal to base excision and nucleotide excision repair, and the recently characterized giant viruses also include these mechanisms. At what point in the evolution of genomes did active repair mechanisms become critical? In particular, how did early RNA genomes protect themselves from UV photodamage that would have hampered nonenzymatic replication and led to a mutation rate too high to pass on accurate sequence information from one generation to the next? Photolyase is a widespread and phylogenetically ancient enzyme that utilizes longer wavelength light to cleave thymine dimers in DNA produced via photodamage. The protein serves as a binding scaffold but does not contribute to the catalytic chemistry; the action of the dinucleotide cofactor FADH(2) breaks the chemical bonds. This small bit of RNA, hailed as a "fossil of the RNA World," contains the flavin heterocycle, whose redox activity has been harnessed for myriad functions of life from metabolism to DNA repair. In present-day biochemistry, flavin biosynthesis begins with guanosine and proceeds through seven steps catalyzed by protein-based enzymes. This leads to the question of how flavins originally evolved. Did the RNA world include ancestral RNA bases with greater redox activity than G, A, C, and U that were capable of photorepair of uracil dimers? Could those ancestral bases have chemically evolved to the current flavin structure? Or did flavins already exist from prebiotic chemical synthesis? And were they then co-opted as catalysts for repair sometime after metabolism was established? In this Account, we analyze simple derivatives of guanosine and other bases that show two prerequisites for flavin-like photolyase activity: a significantly lowered one-electron reduction potential and a red-shifted adsorption spectrum that facilitates excited-state electron transfer in a spectral window that does not produce cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers. Curiously, the best candidate for a primordial flavin is a base damage product, 8-oxo-7,8-dihydroguanine (8-oxoGua or "OG"). Other redox-active ribonucleotides include 5-hydroxycytidine and 5-hydroxyuridine, which display some of the characteristics of flavins, but might also behave like NADH.