Related papers: Punctuated Chirality
The observed single-handedness of biological amino acids and sugars has long been attributed to autocatalysis. However, the stability of homochiral states in deterministic autocatalytic systems relies on cross inhibition of the two chiral…
Chiral symmetry breaking occurs when a physical or chemical process, with no preference for the production of one or other enantiomer, spontaneously generates a large excess of one of the two enantiomers: (L), left-handed or (D), right…
Life as we know it is homochiral, but the origins of biological homochirality on early Earth remain elusive. Shallow closed-basin lakes are a plausible prebiotic environment on early Earth, and most are expected to have significant…
Living systems have evolved to efficiently consume available energy sources using an elaborate circuitry of chemical reactions which, puzzlingly, bear a strict restriction to asymmetric chiral configurations. While autocatalysis is known to…
The phenomenon of life is discussed within a framework of its origin as defined by four hypotheses. The 1. hypothesis says: Life, as we know, is (H-C-N-O) based and relies on the number of bulk (Na-Mg-P-S-Cl-K-Ca) and trace elements…
Homochirality is a signature of life on Earth yet its origins remain an unsolved puzzle. Achieving homochirality is essential for a high-yielding prebiotic network capable of producing functional polymers like ribonucleic acid (RNA) and…
A recently proposed model of non-autocatalytic reactions in dipeptide reactions leading to spontaneous symmetry breaking and homochirality is examined. The model is governed by activation, polymerization, epimerization and depolymerization…
The article seeks to formulate a synergetic law that is posited to be of common physicochemical and biological nature: an evolving system, possessing free energy and elements with chiral asymmetry may change the type of symmetry inside one…
A generalized autocatalytic model for chiral polymerization is investigated in detail. Apart from enantiomeric cross-inhibition, the model allows for the autogenic (non-catalytic) formation of left and right-handed monomers from a substrate…
The emergence of biomolecular homochirality is a critically important question about life phenomenon and the origins of life. In a previous paper (arXiv:1309.1229), I tentatively put forward a new hypothesis that the emergence of a single…
Most animal body plans have some degree of left-right asymmetry. This chirality at the tissue and organ level is often assumed to originate from the intrinsic handedness of biological molecules. How this handedness might be transferred from…
Homochirality, i.e. the dominance across all living matter of one enantiomer over the other among chiral molecules, is thought to be a key step in the emergence of life. Building on ideas put forward by Frank and many others, we proposed…
Biological systems are homochiral, raising the question of how a racemic mixture of prebiotically synthesized biomolecules could attain a homochiral state at the network level. Based on our recent results, we aim to address a related…
Chirality is breaking of mirror symmetry in matter. In the fields of biology and chemistry, this is particularly important because some of the essential molecules in life such as amino acids and DNA have chirality. It is a long-standing…
Chirality is at the origin of life and is ubiquitous in nature. An object is deemed chiral if it is non-superimposable with its own mirror image. This relates to how circularly polarized light interacts with such object, a circular…
While biologists have not yet reached a consensus on the definition of life, homochirality - the specific molecular handedness of biomolecules - is a phenomenon only produced by life. The unraveling of its origin requires interdisciplinary…
Chiral symmetry breaking is ubiquitous in biological systems, from DNA to bacterial suspensions. A key unresolved problem is how chiral structures may spontaneously emerge from achiral interactions. We study a simple model of bacterial…
The development of prebiotic homochirality on early-Earth or another planetary platform may be viewed as a critical phenomenon. It is shown, in the context of spatio-temporal polymerization reaction networks, that environmental effects --…
The homochirality of biomolecules remains one of the outstanding puzzles concerning the beginning of life. Chiral amplification of a randomly perturbed racemic mixture of chiral molecules is a well-accepted prerequisite for all routes to…
Amino acids occurring in proteins are, with rare exceptions, exclusively of the L-configuration. Among the many scenarios put forward to explain the origin of this chiral homogeneity (i.e., homochirality), one involves the asymmetric…