Related papers: Life's Chirality From Prebiotic Environments
Many of the biological phenomena involve collective dynamics driven by self-propelled motion and nonequilibrium force (i.e., activity) that result in features unexpected from equilibrium physics. On the other hand, biological experiments…
I consider the microscopic mechanisms by which a particular left-right (L/R) asymmetry is generated at the organism level from the microscopic handedness of cytoskeletal molecules. In light of a fundamental symmetry principle, the typical…
Autocatalytic Models for the Origin of Biological Homochirality
Although it has been notoriously difficult to pin down precisely what it is that makes life so distinctive and remarkable, there is general agreement that its informational aspect is one key property, perhaps the key property. The unique…
Our Earth, being the only living planet that we know, provides us with clues that photosynthetic life-forms may be dominant on other exoplanets for billions of years. Spectropolarimetric signatures of the terrestrial photosynthetic life…
Chase-and-run dynamics, in which one population pursues another that flees from it, are found throughout nature, from predator-prey interactions in ecosystems to the collective motion of cells during development. Intriguingly, in many of…
Biological cells with all of their surface structure and complex interior stripped away are essentially vesicles - membranes composed of lipid bilayers which form closed sacs. Vesicles are thought to be relevant as models of primitive…
One of the longest standing open problems in science is how life arises from non-living matter. If it is possible to measure this transition in the lab, then it might be possible to understand the physical mechanisms by which the emergence…
Does life exist outside our Solar System? A first step towards searching for life outside our Solar System is detecting life on Earth by using remote sensing applications. One powerful and unambiguous biosignature is the circular…
The long-term habitability of Earth-like planets requires low orbital eccentricities. A secular perturbation from a distant stellar companion is a very important mechanism in exciting planetary eccentricities, as many of the extrasolar…
This is my attempt to answer Schr\"odinger's question: "What is Life?". In living cell the local combination of atoms is reproduced with incredible accuracy. In the case of protein biosynthesis the notion of the physical aspect of the…
Chirality plays a crucial role in determining the structure of many systems in nature. Twisted or helical aggregates as a consequence of self-assembly can be seen in many biological and synthetic materials. Despite extensive theoretical and…
Chirality, a pervasive phenomenon in nature, is widely studied across diverse fields including the origins of life, chemical catalysis, drug discovery, and physical optoelectronics. The investigations of natural chiral materials have been…
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 dominant paradigm in origin of life research is that of an RNA world. However, despite experimental progress towards the spontaneous formation of RNA, the RNA world hypothesis still has its problems. Here, we introduce a novel…
The breadth of topics that encompass the search for life has expanded and evolved significantly since the emergence of the field of astrobiology. Initial astrobiology centered investigations focused on detecting biosignatures in the Martian…
Would another origin of life resemble Earth's biochemical use of amino acids? Here we review current knowledge at three levels: 1) Could other classes of chemical structure serve as building blocks for biopolymer structure and catalysis?…
Life can be viewed as a localized chemical system that sits on, or in the basin of attraction of, a metastable dynamical attractor state that remains out of equilibrium with the environment. Such a view of life allows that new living states…
To study the establishment of homochirality observed in the crystal growth experiment of chiral molecules from a solution under grinding, we extend the lattice gas model of crystal growth as follows. A lattice site can be occupied by a…
"The investigation into the possible effects of cosmic rays on living organisms will also offer great interest." - Victor F. Hess, Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1936 High-energy radiation bursts are commonplace in our Universe. From nearby…