Abstract
We investigate the possibility that prebiotic homochirality can be achieved exclusively through chiral-selective reaction rate parameters without any other explicit mechanism for chiral bias. Specifically, we examine an open network of polymerization reactions, where the reaction rates can have chiral-selective values. The reactions are neither autocatalytic nor do they contain explicit enantiomeric cross-inhibition terms. We are thus investigating how rare a set of chiral-selective reaction rates needs to be in order to generate a reasonable amount of chiral bias. We quantify our results adopting a statistical approach: varying both the mean value and the rms dispersion of the relevant reaction rates, we show that moderate to high levels of chiral excess can be achieved with fairly small chiral bias, below 10%. Considering the various unknowns related to prebiotic chemical networks in early Earth and the dependence of reaction rates to environmental properties such as temperature and pressure variations, we argue that homochirality could have been achieved from moderate amounts of chiral selectivity in the reaction rates.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 333-346 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres |
Volume | 42 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Aug 2012 |
Keywords
- Chirality
- Exoplanets
- Prebiotic chemistry
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
- Space and Planetary Science