Related papers: Theory of cellular homochirality and trait evoluti…
The selection of a single molecular handedness, or homochirality across all living matter, is a mystery in the origin of life. Frank's seminal model showed in the fifties how chiral symmetry breaking can occur in non-equilibrium chemical…
A key open question in the study of life is the origin of biomolecular homochirality: almost every life-form on Earth has exclusively levorotary amino acids and dextrorotary sugars. Will the same handedness be preferred if life is found…
Most biomolecules occur in mirror, or chiral, images of each other. However, life is homochiral: proteins contain almost exclusively levorotatory (L) amino acids, while only dextrorotatory (R) sugars appear in RNA and DNA. The mechanism…
Most animal body plans have some degree of left-right asymmetry. This chirality at the tissue and organ level is often assumed to originate from the intrinsic handedness of biological molecules. How this handedness might be transferred from…
Pasteur has demonstrated that the chiral components in a racemic mixture can separate in homochiral crystals. But with a strong chiral discrimination the chiral components in a concentrated mixture can also phase separate into homochiral…
Most amino acids and sugars molecules occur in mirror, or chiral, images of each other, knowns as enantiomers. However, life on Earth is mostly homochiral: proteins contain almost exclusively L-amino acids, while only D-sugars appear in RNA…
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…
Homochirality, i.e. the dominance across all living matter of one enantiomer over the other among chiral molecules, is thought to be a key step in the emergence of life. Building on ideas put forward by Frank and many others, we proposed…
We study a two-species Vicsek model with intra-species alignment and asymmetric inter-species couplings, where one species aligns with the other while the latter anti-aligns. Motivated by recent results showing that globally coherent chiral…
The origin of bio-homochirality is a subject of much debate. The emergence of chirality and life on earth is a break of symmetry to be compared with the breaks of symmetry in the evolution of the universe. Based on a perspective of…
To understand the chirality selection in the biological organic system, a simple lattice model of chemical reaction with molecular diffusion is proposed and studied by Monte Carlo simulations. In addition to a simple stochastic process of…
To understand the relationship between the chirality of individual cells and that of tissues and organisms, we have developed a chiral polarized particle model to investigate the movement of cell populations on substrates. Our model…
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…
Chirality organize living and active matter systems into striking collective states, yet the principles that govern chiral ordering in open systems, where elements are continuously added or removed, remain unclear. A mutant strain of…
Molecular chirality is critical to biochemical function, but it is unknown when chiral selectivity first became important in the evolutionary transition from geochemistry to biochemistry during the emergence of life. Here, we identify key…
Biological systems are homochiral, raising the question of how a racemic mixture of prebiotically synthesized biomolecules could attain a homochiral state at the network level. Based on our recent results, we aim to address a related…
Recent experiments on monolayers of spindle-like cells plated on adhesive stripe-shaped domains have provided a convincing demonstration that certain types of collective phenomena in epithelia are well described by active nematic…
Chirality in shape and motility can evolve rapidly in microbes and cancer cells. To determine how chirality affects cell fitness, we developed a model of chiral growth in compact aggregates such as microbial colonies and solid tumors. Our…
(abridged) We review recent studies of chirality using circularly polarized light, along with the birth and evolution of life and planetary systems. Terrestrial life consists almost exclusively of one enantiomer, left-handed amino acids.…
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…