Thread by @LyingWrongAgain

Life’s chemical building blocks are almost all one “handed”: chirality

How’d that occur without pre existing cell machinery?

In this study, mixed chirality building blocks > chains that select & amplify 1 chirality (capital letters) over the other (lower case), without cells👇

One limitation of this experiment: the chains self-assembled from building blocks of mixed chirality,

but they were catalyzed by a fiber of building blocks (called amyloids) that self-assembled from only one chirality

However, follow up studies showed building blocks of mixed chirality form amyloids, too

& the amyloids that form with homochiral stretches are more stable

Does this set of experiments prove how abiogenesis solved the “chirality problem”? No

But taken together, this proves mixtures can spontaneously

- form chains with excess of 1 chirality
- select those chains
- amplify & promote regions of homochirality

All without cells

Source nature.com/articles/s4146…