Related papers: Recent Progress in Chirality Research Using Circul…
Ultraviolet circularly polarised light has been suggested as the initial cause of the homochirality of organic molecules in terrestrial organisms, via enantiomeric selection of prebiotic molecules by asymmetric photolysis. We present a…
Photosynthesis is an ancient metabolic process that began on the early Earth, offering plentiful energy to organisms that utilize it, to the extent that they can achieve global significance. The potential exists for similar processes to…
Context. Homochirality is a generic and unique property of life on Earth and is considered a universal and agnostic biosignature. Homochirality induces fractional circular polarization in the incident light that it reflects. Because this…
It has been proposed that spin-polarized cosmic radiation can induce asymmetric changes in helical biopolymers that may account for the emergence of biological homochirality. The parity violation in the weak interaction has direct…
The role of asymmetry on the evolution of prebiotic homochirality is investigated in the context of autocatalytic polymerization reaction networks. A model featuring enantiometric cross-inhibition and chiral bias is used to study the…
Living organisms exhibit consistent homochirality. It is argued that the specific, binary choice made is not an accident but is a consequence of parity violation in the weak interaction expressed by cosmic irradiation. The secondary muons…
Living organisms have some common structures, chemical reactions and molecular structures. The organisms consist of cells with cell division, they have homochirality of protein and carbohydrate units, and metabolism, and genetics, and they…
Homochirality is a generic and unique property of all biochemical life and the fractional circular polarization of light it induces therefore constitutes a potentially unambiguous biosignature.} However, while high-quality circular…
In the laboratory, the photo-and thermochemical evolution of ices, made of simple molecules of astrophysical relevance, always leads to the formation of semi-refractory water-soluble organic residues. Targeted searches for specific…
The identification of a universal biosignature that could be sensed remotely is critical to the prospects for success in the search for life elsewhere in the universe. A candidate universal biosignature is homochirality, which is likely to…
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 chiral puzzle of biological molecules is thought to be closely related to the origin of life and is still a mystery so far. Previously, we proposed a new model on the origin of life, Nebula-Relay hypothesis, which assumed that the life…
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…
Chirality is a feature of many biological systems and much research has been focused on understanding the origin and implications of this property. Famously, sugars and amino acids found in nature are homochiral, i.e., chiral symmetry is…
The emergence of biomolecular homochirality is a critical open question in the field of origins of life. In order to seek out an answer to this unsettled issue, a number of mechanisms have been offered over time, but it still remains a…
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…
In this review we explore aspects of the field of astrobiology from an astronomical viewpoint. We therefore focus on the origin of life in the context of planetary formation, with additional emphasis on tracing the most abundant volatile…
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 demonstrates remarkable homochirality of its major building blocks: nucleic acids, amino acids, sugars, and phospholipids. We propose a mechanism that places the root of life homochirality in the formation of phospholipid bilayer…
Chirality, or handedness, is a geometrical property denoting a lack of mirror symmetry. Chirality is ubiquitous in nature and is associated with the non-reciprocal interactions observed in complex systems ranging from biomolecules to…