Related papers: Chiral Polymerization in Open Systems From Chiral-…
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…
Molecular chirality is a key concept in chemistry with implications for the origin of life and the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals. Previous simulations of a chiral molecular model with an energetic bias towards homochiral interactions…
Stochastic aspects of chemical reaction models related to the Soai reactions as well as to the homochirality in life are studied analytically and numerically by the use of the master equation and random walk model. For systems with a…
Molecular chirality, and the chiral symmetry breaking of resulting macroscopic phases, can be topologically imprinted and manipulated by crosslinking and swelling of polymer networks. We present a new experimental approach to…
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,…
Biological systems like ciliated microorganisms are capable to respond to the external chemical gradients, a process known as chemotaxis which has been studied here using the chiral squirmer model. This theoretical model considers the…
Using an exact solution for the pair interaction potential, we show that long, rigid, chiral molecules with helical surface charge patterns have a preferential interaxial angle ~((RH)^1/2)/L, where L is the length of the molecules, R is the…
In many active matter systems, particle trajectories have a well-defined handedness or chirality. Whether such chiral activity can introduce stereoselective interactions between particles is not known. Here we developed a strategy to tune…
We address a fundamental question: under which conditions do the dynamics and thermodynamics of open chemical reaction networks (CRNs), grounded on the notion of idealized chemostats that exchange selected species, emerge from underlying…
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…
Chirality is an intriguing property of certain molecules, materials or artificial nanostructures, which allows them to interact with the spin angular momentum of the impinging light field. Due to their chiral geometry, they can distinguish…
Chiral discrimination of enantiomeric biomolecules is vital in chemistry, biology, and medicine. Conventional methods, relying on circularly polarized light, face weak chiroptical signals and potential photodamage. Despite extensive efforts…
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…
Biological systems exhibit marked molecular asymmetry, with proteins based predominantly on L-amino acids and nucleic acids and carbohydrates largely composed of D-sugars. Explanations for homochirality include asymmetric photochemistry,…
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…
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…
Imprinting of cholesteric textures in a polymer network is a method of preserving a macroscopically chiral phase in a system with no molecular chirality. By modifying the elastics properties of the network, the resulting stored helical…
In many biological materials with a hierarchical structure there is an intriguing and unique mechanism responsible for the 'propagation' of order from the molecular to the nano- or micro-scale level. Here we present a much simpler molecular…
Helical and helicoidal precipitation patterns emerging in the wake of reaction-diffusion fronts are studied. In our experiments, these chiral structures arise with well-defined probabilities P_H controlled by conditions such as e.g., the…
At the microscopic scale, open chemical reaction networks are described by stochastic reactions that follow mass-action kinetics and are coupled to chemostats. We show that closed chemical reaction networks -- with specific stoichiometries…