Chemists fill a major gap in origin-of-life theories.
Molecules often have a structural asymmetry called chirality, which means they can appear in alternative, mirror-image versions, akin to the left and right versions of human hands. One of the great mysteries about the origins of life on Earth is that virtually all of the fundamental molecules of biology, such as the building blocks of proteins and DNA, appear in just one chiral form.
"There has been a tendency in the field to ignore the chirality issue when looking for plausible reactions that could have made the first biological molecules," Blackmond says."It's frustrating, because without reactions that favor homochirality, we wouldn't have life." In early tests, the team's experimental reaction worked, and yielded amino acids that were enriched for one chiral form versus the other. The problem was that the favored form was the right-handed form -- the one that biology doesn't use.
Once again, the chemists ran into what seemed to be an insurmountable obstacle: They discovered that in forming peptide chains of amino acids, the reaction worked faster for linkages of left-handed with right-handed amino acids -- the opposite of the desired homochiral peptides.
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