Related papers: Life's Chirality From Prebiotic Environments
A material with symmetry breaking inside can transmit the symmetry breaking to its vicinity by vacuum electromagnetic fluctuations. Here, we show that vacuum quantum fluctuations proximate to a parity-symmetry-broken material can induce a…
Bacteria are able to respond to environmental signals by changing their rules of movement. When we take into account chemical signals in the environment, this behaviour is often called chemotaxis. At the individual-level, chemotaxis…
RNA in extant biological systems is homochiral; it consists exclusively of D-ribonucleotides rather than L-ribonucleotides. How the homochirality of RNA emerged is not known. Here, we use stochastic simulations to quantitatively explore the…
Applying the constraints dictated by the principle of detailed balance, we analyze a recent proposal for spontaneous mirror symmetry breaking (SMSB) based on enantioselective autocatalysis coupled to a linear decay of the enantiomers and in…
Research investigating the origins of life usually focuses on exploring possible life-bearing chemistries in the pre-biotic Earth, or else on synthetic approaches. Little work has been done exploring fundamental issues concerning the…
A mystery about the origins of life is which molecular structures $-$ and what spontaneous processes $-$ drove the autocatalytic transition from simple chemistry to biology? Using the HP lattice model of polymer sequence spaces leads to the…
An origin of Earth life on Mars would resolve significant inconsistencies between the inferred history of life and Earth's geologic history. Life as we know it utilizes amino acids, nucleic acids, and lipids for the metabolic,…
A key result of hydrogravitational dynamics cosmology relevant to astrobiology is the early formation of vast numbers of hot primordial-gas planets in million-solar-mass clumps as the dark matter of galaxies and the hosts of first life.…
Terrestrial and extraterrestrial theories of the origin of life are discussed in the light of latest observations. The available data suggest a dual mode of origin, some of the ingredients, including possibly sugars, were brought to earth…
Processes that can produce states of broken chiral symmetry are of particular interest to physics, chemistry and biology. Chiral symmetry breaking during crystallization of sodium chlorate occurs via the production of secondary crystals of…
With the characterisations of potentially habitable planetary atmospheres on the horizon, the search for biosignatures is set to become a major area of research in the coming decades. To understand the atmospheric characteristics that might…
A central need in the field of astrobiology is generalized perspectives on life that make it possible to differentiate abiotic and biotic chemical systems. A key component of many past and future astrobiological measurements is the…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
The dynamic instability of the living systems and the "superposition" of different forms of randomness are viewed as a component of the contingently increasing organization of life along evolution. We briefly survey how classical and…
How might systematic left-right (L/R) asymmetry of the body plan originate in multicellular animals (and plants)? Somehow, the microscopic handedness of biological molecules must be brought up to macroscopic scales. Basic symmetry…
Many examples of cooperation exist in biology. In chemical systems however, which can sometimes be quite complex, we do not appear to observe intricate cooperative interactions. A key question for the origin of life, is then how can…
Certain subterranean environments of Earth have naturally accumulated long-lived radionuclides, such as 238U, 232Th and 40K, near the presence of liquid water. In these natural radioactive environments (NRE), water radiolysis can produce…
Chirality is not just a structural artifact in biology but it may provide for a genuine biological advantage. This is due to the phenomenon of chiral interaction (CI) which is described here for mechanical-chiral devices. The main…
A cluster growth model is proposed to study chiral symmetry breaking in stirred crystallization from an achiral element. Achiral monomers are assumed to coagulate to form chiral clusters from dimers to hexamers. Due to the stirring, the…
The thermodynamic arrow-of-time problem is thought to be resolved by the observation that our universe initially was---and still is---far from equilibrium. The psychological arrow-of-time problem is often attributed the same resolution, but…