Abstract
This review article surveys the recent experimental findings that suggest alternative chemical models of directed chirality amplification at the early, prebiotic Earth. It is believed that the chirality amplification step followed the initial emergence of small enantiomeric imbalance and preceded (as a necessary condition) the occurrence of homochiral biopolymers, assembled from enantiomerically pure building blocks. This work focuses on the chemical nature of possible mechanisms of primordial chirality enhancement, without going into detail of the preceding and subsequent phases of origination of biological homochirality and life on Earth. These mechanisms are discussed through the prism of integrity of biological natural selection and chemical kinetic selection.
Highlights
Chirality is an inherent property of living matter; the existence of chirality has been considered as a necessary condition for the emergence of life [1], which complex phenomenon—in many of its aspects—is likely to become the central object of natural sciences of the 21st century
For the purposes of this work, we focus on catalysis-based mechanisms, in agreement with
Nonautocatalytic hypothesis of prebiotic chirality amplification was suggested by the discovery of the novel dynamic nonlinear effect, termed asymmetric autoamplification (Figure 3(a)), in the oxidative kinetic resolution of secondary alcohols (Figure 3(b)), catalyzed by chiral bis-amino-bis-pyridine manganese complexes [44, 45]
Summary
Chirality is an inherent property of living matter; the existence of chirality has been considered as a necessary condition for the emergence of life [1], which complex phenomenon—in many of its aspects—is likely to become the central object of natural sciences of the 21st century. The standpoint that the initial chirality protosource was introduced from without has received the major experimental and theoretical attention, given that spatial objects contain nonracemic organic matter in abundance (noticeably, the majority of nonracemic amino acids found in meteorites have L-configuration in preference [11,12,13,14,15]) Within this paradigm, the stage of prebiotic chirality amplification (either up to homochiral state or not) is thought of as essential step of terrestrial evolution [6, 10]. We might expect that model systems should conform to some universal regularities, irrespective of the conditions that hypothetically existed at the primitive Earth This contribution discusses experimental findings suggesting possible model catalytic mechanisms of prebiotic chirality amplification. A few other recent intriguing hypotheses, going without the involvement of dynamic nonlinear effects, are considered as well
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