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The origin of biological homochirality along with the origin of life
How homochirality concerning biopolymers (DNA/RNA/proteins) could have originally occurred (i.e., arisen from a non-life chemical world, which tended to be chirality-symmetric) is a long-standing scientific puzzle. For many years, people have focused on exploring plausible physic-chemical mechanisms...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Public Library of Science
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6974302/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31914131 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007592 |
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author | Chen, Yong Ma, Wentao |
author_facet | Chen, Yong Ma, Wentao |
author_sort | Chen, Yong |
collection | PubMed |
description | How homochirality concerning biopolymers (DNA/RNA/proteins) could have originally occurred (i.e., arisen from a non-life chemical world, which tended to be chirality-symmetric) is a long-standing scientific puzzle. For many years, people have focused on exploring plausible physic-chemical mechanisms that may have led to prebiotic environments biased to one chiral type of monomers (e.g., D-nucleotides against L-nucleotides; L-amino-acids against D-amino-acids)–which should have then assembled into corresponding polymers with homochirality, but as yet have achieved no convincing advance. Here we show, by computer simulation–with a model based on the RNA world scenario, that the biased-chirality may have been established at polymer level instead, just deriving from a racemic mixture of monomers (i.e., equally with the two chiral types). In other words, the results suggest that the homochirality may have originated along with the advent of biopolymers during the origin of life, rather than somehow at the level of monomers before the origin of life. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6974302 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-69743022020-02-04 The origin of biological homochirality along with the origin of life Chen, Yong Ma, Wentao PLoS Comput Biol Research Article How homochirality concerning biopolymers (DNA/RNA/proteins) could have originally occurred (i.e., arisen from a non-life chemical world, which tended to be chirality-symmetric) is a long-standing scientific puzzle. For many years, people have focused on exploring plausible physic-chemical mechanisms that may have led to prebiotic environments biased to one chiral type of monomers (e.g., D-nucleotides against L-nucleotides; L-amino-acids against D-amino-acids)–which should have then assembled into corresponding polymers with homochirality, but as yet have achieved no convincing advance. Here we show, by computer simulation–with a model based on the RNA world scenario, that the biased-chirality may have been established at polymer level instead, just deriving from a racemic mixture of monomers (i.e., equally with the two chiral types). In other words, the results suggest that the homochirality may have originated along with the advent of biopolymers during the origin of life, rather than somehow at the level of monomers before the origin of life. Public Library of Science 2020-01-08 /pmc/articles/PMC6974302/ /pubmed/31914131 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007592 Text en © 2020 Chen, Ma http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Chen, Yong Ma, Wentao The origin of biological homochirality along with the origin of life |
title | The origin of biological homochirality along with the origin of life |
title_full | The origin of biological homochirality along with the origin of life |
title_fullStr | The origin of biological homochirality along with the origin of life |
title_full_unstemmed | The origin of biological homochirality along with the origin of life |
title_short | The origin of biological homochirality along with the origin of life |
title_sort | origin of biological homochirality along with the origin of life |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6974302/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31914131 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007592 |
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