Chiral Symmetry Breaking in Large Peptide Systems

Abstract

Chiral symmetry breaking in far from equilibrium systems with large number of amino acids and peptides, like a prebiotic Earth, was considered. It was shown that if organic catalysts were abundant, then effective averaging of enantioselectivity would prohibit any symmetry breaking in such systems. It was further argued that non-linear (catalytic) reactions must be very scarce (called the abundance parameter) and catalysts should work on small groups of similar reactions (called the similarity parameter) in order to chiral symmetry breaking have a chance to occur. Models with 20 amino acids and peptide lengths up to three were considered. It was shown that there are preferred ranges of abundance and similarity parameters where the symmetry breaking can occur in the models with catalytic synthesis / catalytic destruction / both catalytic synthesis and catalytic destruction. It was further shown that models with catalytic synthesis and catalytic destruction statistically result in a substantially higher percentage of the models where the symmetry breaking can occur in comparison to the models with just catalytic synthesis or catalytic destruction. It was also shown that when chiral symmetry breaking occurs, then concentrations of some amino acids, which collectively have some mutually beneficial properties, go up, whereas the concentrations of the ones, which don’t have such properties, go down. An open source code of the whole system was provided to ensure that the results can be checked, repeated, and extended further if needed.