相关论文: Prebiotic Homochirality as a Critical Phenomenon
The emergence and spreading of chirality on the early Earth is considered by studying a set of reaction-diffusion equations based on a polymerization model. It is found that effective mixing of the early oceans is necessary to reach the…
The role of asymmetry on the evolution of prebiotic homochirality is investigated in the context of autocatalytic polymerization reaction networks. A model featuring enantiometric cross-inhibition and chiral bias is used to study the…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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,…
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…
A generalized autocatalytic model for chiral polymerization is investigated in detail. Apart from enantiomeric cross-inhibition, the model allows for the autogenic (non-catalytic) formation of left and right-handed monomers from a substrate…
A recently proposed model of non-autocatalytic reactions in dipeptide reactions leading to spontaneous symmetry breaking and homochirality is examined. The model is governed by activation, polymerization, epimerization and depolymerization…
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…
Conceptualizing planetary habitability depends on understanding how living organisms originated and what features of environments are essential to foster abiogenesis. Estimates of the abundance of life's building blocks are confounded by…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Any search for present or past life beyond Earth should consider the initial processes and related environmental controls that might have led to its start. As on Earth, such an understanding lies well beyond how simple organic molecules…
We study evolutionary processes induced by spatio-temporal dynamics in prebiotic evolution. Using numerical simulations we demonstrate that hypercycles emerge from complex interaction structures in multispecies systems. In this work we also…
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…