The cold origin of life: B. Implications based on pyrimidines and purines produced from frozen ammonium cyanide solutions.

A wide variety of pyrimidines and purines were identified as products of a dilute frozen ammonium cyanide solution that had been held at -78 degrees C for 27 years. This demonstrates that both pyrimidines and purines could have been produced on the primitive earth in a short time by eutectic concentration of HCN, even though the concentration of HCN in the primitive ocean may have been low. We suggest that eutectic freezing is the most plausible demonstrated mechanism by which HCN polymerizations could have produced biologically important prebiotic compounds.