Extraterrestrial ribose and other sugars in primitive meteorites

Significance Ribose is an essential sugar for present life as a building block of RNA, which could have both stored information and catalyzed reactions in primitive life on Earth. Meteorites contain a number of organic compounds including components of proteins and nucleic acids. Among the constituent molecular classes of proteins and nucleic acids (i.e., amino acids, nucleobases, phosphate, and ribose/deoxyribose), the presence of ribose and...