Peptide formation mediated by hydrogen cyanide tetramer: a possible prebiotic process.

Chemical evolution on the primitive earth must have involved condensation of alpha-amino acids to peptides. Under aqueous conditions consistent with current conceptions of primordial waters, heating glycerine with the hydrogen cyanide tetramer, diaminomaleonitrile, yields dipeptide. If nitrogen was cycled through primordial waters as cyanide, peptide synthesis by stepwise tetramer-mediated condensation of alpha-amino acids would have been a plausible process.