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

Abstract

Abstract:The origin of homochirality in life remains a mystery that some believe is essential for life, and which may result from chiral symmetry breaking interactions with galactic organic material.

Anthropics of aluminum-26 decay and biological homochirality

“…Firstly, experiments that have made DNA strands containing chiral defects have shown that they cannot form their pair bonds properly, which would have prevented its ubiquitous use as information storage [7]. It is likely that even if a chirally mixed strand could be used adequately for single celled organisms, the mutation rates would be too high for long lived, multi-celled organisms to survive [5]. Secondly, it is possible to estimate the length that replicating strands of proto-RNA can attain in a mixture of a given chirality, as done in [7].…”

“…Though it has been determined that the level of polarized radiation coming from supernova or stellar winds is incapable of inducing the observed level of chirality, Mie scattering of unpolarized light by aligned dust grains is capable of imprinting a preference in the molecular cloud [24]. The trouble with this scenario is that even though each individual supernova may produce light of a definite polarization, depending on its geometry with respect to the molecular cloud, aggregating the effect over many supernovae would tend to wash this effect out [5].…”

“…In [5] it was demonstrated that this process is capable of inducing a sufficient level of chirality in the medium. For typical values of molecular cloud density, a given decay product interacts with 10 5 different electrons before it becomes nonrelativistic, and for reasonable concentrations produced by supernovae injection is much more than sufficient to polarize the entire medium, by many orders of magnitude.…”

Tempo-spatial chirogenesis. Limonene-induced mirror symmetry breaking of Si Si bond polymers during aggregation in chiral fluidic media

“…A possibility of L-D preference at molecular level has been long discussed by several researchers [64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73] in terms of hierarchical scenarios due to inherent handedness ubiquitously existing in our universe, for example, handed weak neutral currents and anti-neutrinos [14,15,[64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75]. Elemental particle physicists, astrophysicists, and molecular physicists assume that CP (charge-parity) symmetry breaking, as proven by recent B 0 -meson decay experiments at SLAC (USA) and KEK (Japan), should be responsible for dominance of handed chiral matters over their anti-matters in our universe [76][77][78][79][80].…”

Origin of Terrestrial Bioorganic Homochirality and Symmetry Breaking in the Universe

“…One of the most attractive recent hypotheses in the context of astrobiology advocates that polarized quantum radiation in space, such as circularly polarized photons [1][2][3] or spin-polarized particles, can induce asymmetric conditions in the primitive interstellar media resulting in terrestrial bioorganic homochirality (the cosmic scenario). In particular, nuclear-decay-or cosmic-ray-derived leptons (i.e., electrons, muons, and neutrinos) in nature have a specified helicity, that is, they have a spin angular momentum polarized parallel or antiparallel to their kinetic momentum due to parity violations (PV) in the weak interaction as a result of intrinsic symmetry breaking in nature [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14].…”