Chirality Selection in Open Flow Systems and in Polymerization

Abstract

As an attempt to understand the homochirality of organic molecules in life, a chemical reaction model is proposed where the production of chiral monomers from achiral substrate is catalyzed by the polymers of the same enatiomeric type. This system has to be open because in a closed system the enhanced production of chiral monomers by enzymes is compensated by the associated enhancement in back reaction, and the chiral symmetry is conserved. Open flow without cross inhibition is shown to lead to the chirality selection in a general model. In polymerization, the influx of substrate from the ambience and the efflux of chiral products for purposes other than the catalyst production make the system necessarily open. The chiral symmetry is found to be broken if the influx of substrate lies within a finite interval. As the efficiency of the enzyme increases, the maximum value of the enantiomeric excess approaches unity so that the chirality selection becomes complete.

8 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Complete homochirality induced by the nonlinear autocatalysis and recycling
• Chirality Selection in Crystallization
• Homochirality proliferation in space

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Stability of racemic and chiral steady states in open and closed chemical systems
• Chiral polymerization: symmetry breaking and entropy production in closed systems
• Fluctuation Induced Homochirality
• Toward homochiral protocells in noncatalytic peptide systems
• Stochastic Approach to Enantiomeric Excess Amplification and Chiral Symmetry Breaking
• Life's Chirality From Prebiotic Environments
• Emergence of homochirality via template-directed ligation in an RNA reactor
• Mirror symmetry breaking and restoration: the role of noise and chiral bias
• Diffusion Enhances Chirality Selection