Mirror Symmetry Breaking in Liquids and Their Impact on the Development of Homochirality in Abiogenesis: Emerging Proto-RNA as Source of Biochirality?

• Main Authors: Carsten Tschierske, Christian Dressel
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-07-01
• Series: Symmetry
• Subjects: mirror symmetry breaking; biological chirality; liquid crystals; proto-RNA; networks; compartmentalization
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/12/7/1098

Recent progress in mirror symmetry breaking and chirality amplification in isotropic liquids and liquid crystalline cubic phases of achiral molecule is reviewed and discussed with respect to its implications for the hypothesis of emergence of biological chirality. It is shown that mirror symmetry breaking takes place in fluid systems where homochiral interactions are preferred over heterochiral and a dynamic network structure leads to chirality synchronization if the enantiomerization barrier is sufficiently low, i.e., that racemization drives the development of uniform chirality. Local mirror symmetry breaking leads to conglomerate formation. Total mirror symmetry breaking requires either a proper phase transitions kinetics or minor chiral fields, leading to stochastic and deterministic homochirality, respectively, associated with an extreme chirality amplification power close to the bifurcation point. These mirror symmetry broken liquids are thermodynamically stable states and considered as possible systems in which uniform biochirality could have emerged. A model is hypothesized, which assumes the emergence of uniform chirality by chirality synchronization in dynamic “helical network fluids” followed by polymerization, fixing the chirality and leading to proto-RNA formation in a single process.