相关论文: Emergence of homochirality in large molecular syst…
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…
Chirality is a feature of many biological systems and much research has been focused on understanding the origin and implications of this property. Famously, sugars and amino acids found in nature are homochiral, i.e., chiral symmetry is…
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…
The search for life elsewhere in the universe is a pivotal question in modern science. However, to address whether life is common in the universe we must first understand the likelihood of abiogenesis by studying the origin of life on…
The question of the onset of the homochirality on prebiotic Earth still remains a fundamental question in the quest for the origin of life. Recent works in this field introduce the concept of recycling, rather than the traditional open-flow…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
The emergence of biomolecular homochirality is a critically important question about life phenomenon and the origins of life. In a previous paper (arXiv:1309.1229), I tentatively put forward a new hypothesis that the emergence of a single…
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…
Living organisms have some common structures, chemical reactions and molecular structures. The organisms consist of cells with cell division, they have homochirality of protein and carbohydrate units, and metabolism, and genetics, and they…
The path toward the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required…
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…
As an attempt to understand the homochirality of organic molecules in life, a chemical reaction model is proposed where the production of chiral monomers from achiral substrate is catalyzed by the polymers of the same enatiomeric type. This…
We propose a new mechanism for the achievment of homochirality in life without any autocatalytic production process. Our model consists of a spontaneous production together with a recycling cross inhibition in a closed system. It is shown…
We investigate the possibility that prebiotic homochirality can be achieved exclusively through chiral-selective reaction rate parameters without any other explicit mechanism for chiral bias. Specifically, we examine an open network of…
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 emergence of biomolecular homochirality is a critical open question in the field of origins of life. In order to seek out an answer to this unsettled issue, a number of mechanisms have been offered over time, but it still remains a…
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…