Recent work suggests a link between chiral asymmetry in the amino acid iso-valine extracted from the Murchison meteorite and the extent of hydrous alteration. We present the results of neutron scattering experiments on an exchanged, 1-dimensionally ordered n-propyl ammonium vermiculite clay. The vermiculite gel has a (001) d-spacing of order 5nm at the temperature and concentration of the experiments and the d-spacing responds sensitively to changes in concentration, temperature and electronic environment. The data show that isothermal addition of D-histidine or L-histidine solutions produces shifts in the d-spacing that are different for each enantiomer. This chiral specificity is of interest for the question of whether clays could have played an important role in the origin of biohomochirality.
@article{arxiv.1007.2432,
title = {Chiral Interactions of Histidine in a Hydrated Vermiculite},
author = {Donald G. Fraser and H. Christopher Greenwell and Neal T. Skipper and Martin V. Smalley and Michael A. Wilkinson and Bruno Demé and R. K. Heenan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1007.2432},
year = {2017}
}