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On biological homochirality

Rodrick Wallace¹

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1. New York State Psychiatric Institute

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Document Type:

Manuscript

Date:

Received 26 October 2009 13:56 UTC; Posted 26 October 2009

Subjects:

Chemistry, Earth & Environment, Evolutionary Biology

Tags:

• groupoid
• homochirality
• Information
• stereochemistry

Abstract:

Generalizing Landau’s spontaneous symmetry breaking arguments using the standard groupoid approach to stereochemistry allows reconsideration of the origin of biological homochirality. On Earth, limited metabolic free energy density may have served as a low temperature analog to ‘freeze’ the system into the set of simplest homochiral transitive groupoids representing reproductive chemistries. These engaged in Darwinian competition until a single configuration survived. Subsequent path dependent evolutionary process licked in this initial condition. Astrobiological outcomes, in the presence of higher initial metabolic free energy densities, could well be considerably richer, perhaps of mixed chirality. One result would be a complicated distribution of biological chirality across a statistically large sample of extraterrestrial stereochemistry, in contrast with a recent prediction of a racemic average.

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This document is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

How to cite this document:

Wallace, Rodrick. On biological homochirality. Available from Nature Precedings <http://hdl.handle.net/10101/npre.2009.3902.1> (2009)

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