"Unraveling the Origins of Molecular Handedness and Homochirality in Prebiotic Chemistry"
Originally Published 1 year ago — by Nature.com
A study published in Nature explores a prebiotically plausible route to proteinogenic peptides and discovers a preference for heterochiral ligation, which initially seems problematic for the emergence of homochiral l-peptides. However, the study paradoxically demonstrates that this heterochiral preference provides a mechanism for enantioenrichment in homochiral chains, leading to symmetry breaking, chiral amplification, and chirality transfer processes in multicomponent competitive reactions. The findings offer insights into the emergence of homochirality in biological polymers and provide a prebiotically plausible mechanism for this phenomenon.