Related papers: Punctuated Chirality
Life is homochiral and homochirality is a fundamental feature of living systems on Earth. While the exact mechanism that led to homochirality is still not fully understood, any realistic scenario on the origins of life needs to address the…
Biosystems contain an almost infinite amount of vital important details, which together ensure their life. There are, however, some common structures and reactions in the systems: the homochirality of carbohydrates and proteins, the…
Results of recent experiment reinstate feasibility to the hypothesis that biomolecular homochirality originates from beta decay. Coupled with hints that this process occurred extraterrestrially suggests aluminum-26 as the most likely…
Homochirality is a generic and unique property of all biochemical life and is considered a universal and agnostic biosignature. Upon interaction with unpolarized light, homochirality induces fractional circular polarization in the light…
A nonlinear autocatalysis of a chiral substance is shown to achieve homochirality in a closed system, if the back-reaction is included. Asymmetry in the concentration of two enantiomers or the enantiometric excess increases due to the…
Biological molecules are characterized by an intrinsic asymmetry known as homochirality. The result is optical activity of biological materials and circular polarization in the light scattered by microorganisms, cells of living organisms,…
Biological macromolecules, proteins and nucleic acids are composed exclusively of chirally pure monomers. The chirality consensus appears vital for life and it has even been considered as a prerequisite of life. However the primary cause…
Biomolecules that constitute life on Earth are chiral, but the precise mechanism by which homochirality emerged remains a mystery. In this work it is demonstrated that reactions of radical pairs, where one of the radical electron spins is…
The emergence and spreading of chirality on the early Earth is considered by studying a set of reaction-diffusion equations based on a polymerization model. It is found that effective mixing of the early oceans is necessary to reach the…
The homochirality of biological molecules on the Earth is a long-standing mystery regarding the origin of life. Circularly polarized ultraviolet (UV) light could induce the enantiomeric excess of biological molecules in the interstellar…
The complex physicochemical structures and chemical reactions in living organism have some common features: (1) The life processes take place in the cytosol in the cells, which, from a physicochemical point of view is an emulsion of…
Understanding chirality transfer from the molecular to the macroscopic scale poses a significant challenge in soft and biological condensed matter physics. Many nanorods of biological origin not only have chiral molecular features but also…
The critical properties of the Frank model of spontaneous chiral synthesis are discussed by applying results from the field theoretic renormalization group (RG). The long time and long wavelength features of this microscopic reaction scheme…
We propose a new mechanism for the achievment of homochirality in life without any autocatalytic production process. Our model consists of a spontaneous production together with a recycling cross inhibition in a closed system. It is shown…
We explore the interplay between tunneling process and chiral interactions in the discrimination of chiral states for an ensemble of molecules in a biological environment. Each molecule is described by an asymmetric double-well potential…
We investigate the possibility that prebiotic homochirality can be achieved exclusively through chiral-selective reaction rate parameters without any other explicit mechanism for chiral bias. Specifically, we examine an open network of…
Spiral galaxies show axial symmetry and an intrinsic 2D-chirality. Environmental effects can influence the chirality of originally isolated stellar systems and a progressive loss of chirality can be recognised in the Hubble sequence. We…
The presence of chirality in the main molecules of life may well be not just a structural artifact, but of pure biological advantage. The possibility of the existence of a phenomenon of a special mode of interaction, labeled as "chiral…
In chemistry and biochemistry, chirality represents the structural asymmetry characterized by non-superimposable mirror images for a material like DNA. In physics, however, chirality commonly refers to the spin-momentum locking of a…
We show how spatiotemporal fluctuations can induce spontaneous symmetry breaking in systems which are perfectly symmetric in the absence of fluctuations. We illustrate this in the context of the autocatalytic production of chiral…