Related papers: Homochirality: a prerequisite or consequence of li…
Geometrical chirality is a universal property encountered on very different length scales ranging from geometrical shapes of living organisms to protein and DNA molecules. Interaction of chiral matter with chiral light - that is,…
The oldest forms of living organisms on Earth are about 3.5 billion years old, and they are found in hydrothermal deposits, and it is often hypothesized that life originated there. But the hydrothermal systems with a fairly strong flow of…
It is well known that life on Earth alters its environment over evolutionary and geological timescales. An important open question is whether this is a result of evolutionary optimization or a universal feature of life. In the latter case,…
One thing that discriminates living things from inanimate matter is their ability to generate similarly complex or non-random architectures in a large abundance. From DNA sequences to folded protein structures, living cells, microbial…
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…
It is argued that selection criteria usually referred to as "anthropic conditions" for the existence of intelligent (typical) observers widely adopted in cosmology amount only to preconditions for primitive life. The existence of life does…
Chirality, the property of asymmetry, is of great importance in biological and physical phenomena. This prospective offers an overview of the emerging field of chiral bioinspired plasmonics and metamaterials, aiming to uncover nature's…
Chirality, handedness, is one of the most fundamental intriguing asymmetries in nature. By definition, chiral objects cannot be superimposed onto each other after mirror reflection operation. Numerous examples of chiral structures can be…
Chirality is a ubiquitous phenomenon in which a symmetry between left- and right-handed objects is broken, examples in nature ranging from subatomic particles and molecules to living organisms. In particle physics, the weak force is…
It has been long recognized that the spatial polarization of the electronic clouds in molecules, and the spatial arrangements of atoms into chiral molecular structures, play crucial roles in physics, chemistry and biology. However, these…
Due to recent advances in synthetic biology and artificial life, the origin of life is currently a hot topic of research. We review the literature and argue that the two traditionally competing "replicator-first" and "metabolism-first"…
An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a…
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…
The mechanisms for explaining how a stable asymmetric chemical system can be formed from a symmetric chemical system, in the absence of any asymmetric influence other than statistical fluctuations, have been developed during the last…
A nonlinear autocatalysis of a chiral substance is shown to achieve homochirality in a closed system, if the back-reaction is included. Asymmetry in the concentration of two enantiomers or the enantiometric excess increases due to the…
Chirality is a pervasive form of symmetry that is intimately connected to the physical properties of solids, as well as the chemical and biological activity of molecular systems. However, its control with light is challenging, because…
Living systems have evolved to efficiently consume available energy sources using an elaborate circuitry of chemical reactions which, puzzlingly, bear a strict restriction to asymmetric chiral configurations. While autocatalysis is known to…
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…
The fundamental issues of symmetry related to chirality are discussed and applied to simple situations relevant to liquid crystals. We show that any chiral measure of a geometric object is a pseudoscalar (invariant under proper rotations…
Abiotic emergence of ordered information stored in the form of RNA is an important unresolved problem concerning the origin of life. A polymer longer than 40--100 nucleotides is necessary to expect a self-replicating activity, but the…