Related papers: Theory of cellular homochirality and trait evoluti…
While biologists have not yet reached a consensus on the definition of life, homochirality - the specific molecular handedness of biomolecules - is a phenomenon only produced by life. The unraveling of its origin requires interdisciplinary…
Homochirality is a signature of life on Earth yet its origins remain an unsolved puzzle. Achieving homochirality is essential for a high-yielding prebiotic network capable of producing functional polymers like ribonucleic acid (RNA) and…
Intimately connected to the rule of life, chirality remains a long-time fascination in biology, chemistry, physics and materials science. Chiral structures, e.g., nucleic acid and cholesteric phase developed from chiral molecules are common…
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…
Living organisms exhibit consistent homochirality. It is argued that the specific, binary choice made is not an accident but is a consequence of parity violation in the weak interaction expressed by cosmic irradiation. The secondary muons…
The observed single-handedness of biological amino acids and sugars has long been attributed to autocatalysis. However, the stability of homochiral states in deterministic autocatalytic systems relies on cross inhibition of the two chiral…
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…
Chirality is breaking of mirror symmetry in matter. In the fields of biology and chemistry, this is particularly important because some of the essential molecules in life such as amino acids and DNA have chirality. It is a long-standing…
Biological macromolecules, proteins and nucleic acids are composed exclusively of chirally pure monomers. The chirality consensus appears vital for life and it has even been considered as a prerequisite of life. However the primary cause…
Flocking is ubiquitous in nature and emerges due to short- or long-range alignment interactions among self-propelled agents. Two unfriendly species that antialign or even interact nonreciprocally show more complex collective phenomena,…
Biomolecules that constitute life on Earth are chiral, but the precise mechanism by which homochirality emerged remains a mystery. In this work it is demonstrated that reactions of radical pairs, where one of the radical electron spins is…
Various biological phenomena, like cell differentiation and pattern formation in multicellular organisms, are explained using the bifurcation theory. Molecular network motifs like positive feedback and mutual repressor exhibit bifurcation…
We generalize the Vicsek model to describe the collective behaviour of polar circle swimmers with local alignment interactions. While the phase transition leading to collective motion in 2D (flocking) occurs at the same interaction to noise…
Chiral processes that lack mirror symmetry pervade nature from enantioselective molecular interactions to the asymmetric development of organisms. An outstanding challenge at the interface between physics and biology consists in bridging…
Emergence of collective dynamical chirality (CDC) at mesoscopic scales plays a key role in many formation processes of chiral structures in nature, which may also provide possible routines for people to fabricate complex chiral…
Cellular differentiation in a developping organism is studied via a discrete bistable reaction-diffusion model. A system of undifferentiated cells is allowed to receive an inductive signal emenating from its environment. Depending on the…
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…
We examine the effect of decoherence and intermolecular interactions (chiral discrimination energies) on the chiral stability and the distinguishability of initially pure versus mixed states in an open chiral system. Under a two-level…
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…
The chiral structure of liquid crystalline phases arises due to the intrinsic chirality of the constituent mesogens. While it is seemingly straightforward to quantify the macroscopic chirality by using, for instance, the cholesteric pitch…