Related papers: Recent Progress in Chirality Research Using Circul…
The search for life elsewhere in the universe is a pivotal question in modern science. However, to address whether life is common in the universe we must first understand the likelihood of abiogenesis by studying the origin of life on…
Most amino acids and sugars molecules occur in mirror, or chiral, images of each other, knowns as enantiomers. However, life on Earth is mostly homochiral: proteins contain almost exclusively L-amino acids, while only D-sugars appear in RNA…
Chirality or the property that distinguishes lefthandedness from righthandedness is an important aspect of the universe, starting from neutrinos, which are lefthanded. Fifteen years ago the author had proposed that life on the earth was…
A key open question in the study of life is the origin of biomolecular homochirality: almost every life-form on Earth has exclusively levorotary amino acids and dextrorotary sugars. Will the same handedness be preferred if life is found…
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…
Conceptualizing planetary habitability depends on understanding how living organisms originated and what features of environments are essential to foster abiogenesis. Estimates of the abundance of life's building blocks are confounded by…
Most biomolecules occur in mirror, or chiral, images of each other. However, life is homochiral: proteins contain almost exclusively levorotatory (L) amino acids, while only dextrorotatory (R) sugars appear in RNA and DNA. The mechanism…
Molecular chirality is inherent to biology and cellular chemistry. In this report, the origin of enantiomeric selectivity is analyzed from the viewpoint of the "RNA World" model, based on the autocatalytic self-replication of glyceraldehyde…
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…
Many of the building blocks of life such as amino acids and nucleotides are chiral, i.e., different from their mirror image. Contemporary life selects and synthesizes only one of two possible handednesses. In an abiotic environment,…
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 origin of bio-homochirality is a subject of much debate. The emergence of chirality and life on earth is a break of symmetry to be compared with the breaks of symmetry in the evolution of the universe. Based on a perspective of…
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…
Chirality, or handedness, enters astrophysics in three distinct ways. Magnetic field and vortex lines tend to be helical and have a systematic twist in the northern and southern hemispheres of a star or a galaxy. Helicity is here driven by…
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,…
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…
The homochirality of the molecules of life has been a vexing problem with no generally accepted solution to date. Since a racemic mixture of chiral nucleotides frustrates the extension and replication of RNA and DNA, understanding the…
It has been long recognized that the spatial polarization of the electronic clouds in molecules, and the spatial arrangements of atoms into chiral molecular structures, play crucial roles in physics, chemistry and biology. However, these…
Chirality is ubiquitous from microscopic to macroscopic phenomena in physics and biology, such as fermionic interactions and DNA duplication. In photonics, chirality has traditionally represented differentiated optical responses for right…
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…