ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
On the origins of life's homochirality: Inducing enantiomeric excess with spin-polarized electrons.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
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33 citing papers in PubMed, 1 citations in OpenAlex.
- From searching for extraterrestrial biosignatures to exploring the origins of life: A prebiotic chemistry perspective.Fundamental research · 2026Review
- Dual-parameter chiral detection at the single-particle level enabled by surface cosine waves.Science advances · 2026Article
- Parallel alignment of electric and magnetic transition dipole moments in chiral additives can boost the oxygen evolution reaction.Communications chemistry · 2026Article
- All-optically tunable electromagnetic chirality transfer.Science advances · 2026Article
- A highly limited amino acid library from asteroid Bennu yields wide-ranging protein folds.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Unraveling hidden symmetry breaking in racemic compounds.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Chirality-Induced Orbital-Angular-Momentum Selectivity in Electron Transmission and Scattering.Journal of chemical theory and computation · 2026Article
- Interstep compatibility of a model for the prebiotic synthesis of RNA consistent with Hadean natural history.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Symmetry Breaking of Molecules Triggered by Chiral Inorganic Nanostructures Without Organic Components.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Review
- Spontaneous Emergence of Homochiral Suspensions from Racemic Solutions via Stochastic Nucleation.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2025Article
- Serine Octamer Clusters Direct the Chirality of Peptides Formed in Water Microdroplets.The journal of physical chemistry. A · 2025Article
- Article
- Permeability selection of biologically relevant membranes matches the stereochemistry of life on Earth.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Role of Electron Spin, Chirality, and Charge Dynamics in Promoting the Persistence of Nascent Nucleic Acid-Peptide Complexes.The journal of physical chemistry. B · 2025Article
- Primitive homochiral polyester formation driven by tartaric acid and calcium availability.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Chiral Phonons Enhance Ferromagnetism.The journal of physical chemistry letters · 2025Article
- On the Origin of Life on Earth: The Nanozymes Hypothesis, and More.Research (Washington, D.C.) · 2025Review
- Influence of Electrostatic Field on Optical Rotation of D-Glucose Solution: Experimental Research for Electric Field-Induced Biological Effect.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Spectroscopic Study of a Novel Binaphthyl Amine Fluorescent Probe for Chiral Recognition of D/L-Lysine.International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Article
- Single-Molecule Electrical Profiling of Peptides and Proteins.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2024Review
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Life as we know it is homochiral, but the origins of biological homochirality on early Earth remain elusive. Shallow closed-basin lakes are a plausible prebiotic environment on early Earth, and most are expected to have significant sedimentary magnetite deposits. We hypothesize that ultraviolet (200- to 300-nm) irradiation of magnetite deposits could generate hydrated spin-polarized electrons sufficient to induce enantioselective prebiotic chemistry. Such electrons are potent reducing agents that drive reduction reactions where the spin polarization direction can enantioselectively alter the reaction kinetics. Our estimate of this chiral bias is based on the strong effective spin-orbit coupling observed in the chiral-induced spin selectivity (CISS) effect, as applied to energy differences in reduction reactions for different isomers. In the original CISS experiments, spin-selective electron transmission through a monolayer of double-strand DNA molecules is observed at room temperature-indicating a strong coupling between molecular chirality and electron spin. We propose that the chiral symmetry breaking due to the CISS effect, when applied to reduction chemistry, can induce enantioselective synthesis on the prebiotic Earth and thus facilitate the homochiral assembly of life's building blocks.
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