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Cracking Chirality The Mystery of Mirror Molecules
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Cracking Chirality from @ChemistryShorts explores how the essential molecules of life, like DNA, RNA, and proteins, acquired their homochiral structures and how magnetic rocks at the bottom of a prebiotic lake, may have set the stage for life as we know it. • In a mirror, our bodies appear symmetrical from the right to the left. But hold one hand on top of the other, rather than palm-to-palm, and you’ll notice that they are not in fact the same; they have a defined right- or left-handedness, or chirality. Look even deeper inside, at the molecular level, and you’ll find that many of the important molecules in our bodies are similarly right or left-handed, and exist in only one form or the other. We call this homochirality. • Chirality is the idea that some molecules come in two mirror-image configurations. Despite having the exact same chemical compositions, their physical structures are different. These left-handed and right-handed molecules can have different properties and functions. Understanding how chiral molecules function differently is essential to chemical synthesis and medicine. But it also holds a curious question about early life: why are the nucleic acids that hold genetic information in all of life right-handed, while the amino acids that they encode left-handed? • In Cracking Chirality,” two Harvard University scientists, Dimitar Sasselov and Furkan Ozturk (@SFurkanOzturk61 ) present their exciting new findings: magnetized molecules found at the bottom of lakes on the primordial Earth may be the key to how important biological molecules crystallized and grew, tipping the scales from a 50-50 mixture of molecules to homochiral solutions made up of just one or the other. Their simple experimental setups, growing crystals on tiny magnetized plates, help provide a solution to an essential question about life itself that has plagued scientists for decades.
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