Topic: Homochirality

Donna Blackmond examines two linked problems in the origin of life: how an initially balanced mixture of molecular mirror images could acquire a handedness bias, and how that small bias could be amplified. She compares four experimental approaches using chemical kinetics and solid–solution equilibria. The first is asymmetric autocatalysis, including the Soai reaction and kinetic models connecting self-replication with suppression of the opposite enantiomer. Blackmond distinguishes this powerful model from a demonstrated prebiotic pathway. She then discusses amplification through eutectic part

The question of the origin of homochirality of living matter, or the dominance of one handedness for all molecules of life across the entire biosphere, is a long-standing puzzle in the research on the Origin of Life. In the fifties, Frank proposed a mechanism to explain homochirality based on the properties of a simple autocatalytic network containing only a few chemical species. Following this work, chemists struggled to find experimental realizations of this model, possibly due to a lack of proper methods to identify autocatalysis [1]. In any case, a model based on a few chemical species see