Related papers: Homochirality proliferation in space
Many of the building blocks of life such as amino acids and nucleotides are chiral, i.e., different from their mirror image. Contemporary life selects and synthesizes only one of two possible handednesses. In an abiotic environment,…
Chiral symmetry breaking is ubiquitous in biological systems, from DNA to bacterial suspensions. A key unresolved problem is how chiral structures may spontaneously emerge from achiral interactions. We study a simple model of bacterial…
The emergence of chirality in enantioselective autocatalysis for compounds unable to transform according to the Frank-like reaction network is discussed with respect to the controversial limited enantioselectivity (LES) model composed of…
Autocatalysis is thought to have played an important role in the earliest stages of the origin of life. An autocatalytic cycle (AC) is a set of reactions that results in stoichiometric increase in its constituent chemicals. When the…
The homochirality of biomolecules remains one of the outstanding puzzles concerning the beginning of life. Chiral amplification of a randomly perturbed racemic mixture of chiral molecules is a well-accepted prerequisite for all routes to…
Active matter describes materials whose constituents are driven out of equilibrium by continuous energy consumption, for instance from ATP. Due to the orientable character of the constituents, active suspensions can attain liquid…
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…
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 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…
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…
Chirality is ubiquitous in nature across all length scales, with major implications spanning the fields of biology, chemistry and physics to materials science. How chirality propagates from nanoscale building blocks to meso- and macroscopic…
Molecular chirality is a key concept in chemistry with implications for the origin of life and the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals. Previous simulations of a chiral molecular model with an energetic bias towards homochiral interactions…
We explore the interplay between tunneling process and chiral interactions in the discrimination of chiral states for an ensemble of molecules in a biological environment. Each molecule is described by an asymmetric double-well potential…
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…
Many biological and synthetic materials self-assemble into helical or twisted aggregates. The shape is determined by a complex interplay between elastic forces and the orientation and chirality of the constituent molecules. We study this…
Chirality is an important concept that describes the asymmetry property of a system, which usually emerges spontaneously due to mirror symmetry breaking. Such spontaneous chirality manifests predominantly as parity breaking in modern…
The occurrence of biological homochirality is attributed to symmetry breaking mechanisms which are still debatable1. Studies of symmetry breaking require tools for monitoring the population ratios of individual chiral nano-objects, such as…
Understanding the spatio-temporal evolution of radiolytic species created by high-energy electrons in water underpins key applications from radiotherapy and nuclear safety to environmental processing and electron microscopy. Here, using the…
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…
Chirality is probably the most mysterious among all symmetry transformations. Very readily broken in biological systems, it is practically absent in naturally occurring inorganic materials and is very challenging to create artificially.…