The origin and amplification of biomolecular chirality

E

“…Taking into account the fact that enzyme chains are generally made of hundreds of monomers, the tremendous gain in simplicity offered by the use of monomers restricted to one handedness is self-evident. The excess of L-amino acids found in the Murchison meteorite may result from the processing of the organic mantles of interstellar grains by circularly polarized synchrotron radiation from a neutron star remnant of a supernova (Bonner 1991).…”

Possible Physical Mechanisms in the Galaxy to Cause Homochiral Biomaterials for Life

“…Recently, there has been increasing interest in the chiral nature or handedness of biomolecules. In fact, there are some who claim that the complex biomolecular structure of life must have arisen from a "chiral pure" medium [12,13]. This may be a precondition for the emergence of self-replicating biomolecular systems.…”

“…This may be a precondition for the emergence of self-replicating biomolecular systems. Table 1 lists some of these ideas, which have been put forward largely by W. Bonner and V. Goldanskii [12,13]. We also point out a recent review in Reference [14]; see also Reference [15] for more recent details.…”

“…Over a period of 20 years, many experiments have been carried out (see Reference [12] for a nearly complete list). However, it appears that nearly every positive effect that was observed has turned out to be incorrect.…”

Freudian abstracts

“…Why should chemistry in such a cloud have a bias towards onehandedness? One possibility 10 is that an enantiomeric preference may have been imposed on the cloud out of which our Solar System formed by circularly polarized light, perhaps synchrotron radiation from a neutron star 11 . If a substantial fraction of the organic inventory of early Earth was then derived from comets and asteroids 12 , the synchrotron-radiation hypothesis would connect terrestrial biochemistry with the extreme physics of collapsed stars.…”