Related papers: Life's Chirality From Prebiotic Environments
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…
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…
Biological molecules chose one of two structurally, chiral systems which are related by reflection in a mirror. It is proposed that this choice was made, causally, by magnetically polarized and physically chiral cosmic-rays, which are known…
Several aspects of mathematical astrobiology are discussed. It is argued that around the time of the origin of life the handedness of biomolecules must have established itself through an instability. Possible pathways of producing a certain…
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…
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 origin of chirality, closely related to the evolution of life on the earth, has long been debated. In 1991, Abdus Salam suggested a novel approach to achieve biomolecular homochirality by a phase transition. In his subsequent…
Recently the first chemical systems which show the amplification of enantiometric excess (ee) was found. Inspired by these experiments, we propose a few chemical reaction models in a closed system. The reactions consist of autocatalytic…
Why life is complex and --most importantly-- what is the origin of the over abundance of complexity in nature? This is a fundamental scientific question which, paraphrasing the late Per Bak, "is screaming to be answered but seldom is even…
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…
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…
Autocatalysis is thought to have played an important role in the earliest stages of the origin of life. An autocatalytic cycle (AC) is a set of reactions that results in stoichiometric increase in its constituent chemicals. When the…
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…
The occurrence of biological homochirality is attributed to symmetry breaking mechanisms which are still debatable1. Studies of symmetry breaking require tools for monitoring the population ratios of individual chiral nano-objects, such as…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
The emergence of biomolecular homochirality requires both an initial symmetry-breaking event and a mechanism to amplify and preserve a chiral imbalance. Magnetic minerals have been shown to function as chiral agents through the…
The probability that life spontaneously emerges in a suitable environment (abiogenesis) is one of the major unknowns in astrobiology. Assessing its value is impeded by the lack of an accepted theory for the origin of life, and is further…