possible physical mechanisms in the galaxy to cause homochiral biomaterials for life银河系中可能的物理机制导致homochiral生物材料.pdfVIP

2010, 2, 1450-1460; doi:10.3390/sym2031450 OPEN ACCESS symmetry ISSN 2073-8994 /journal/symmetry Review Possible Physical Mechanisms in the Galaxy to Cause Homochiral Biomaterials for Life David B. Cline Astrophysics Division, UCLA Physics Astronomy Department, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA; E-Mail: dcline@ Received: 2 February 2010; in revised form: 8 May 2010 / Accepted: 21 June 2010 / Published: 9 July 2010 Abstract: The origin of homochirality in life remains a mystery that some believe is essential for life, and which may result from chiral symmetry breaking interactions with galactic organic material. Keywords: homochirality; symmetry-breaking; biomolecules 1. Introduction For more than a century, there has been evidence for the chiral nature of life forms on Earth. Pasteur was among the first to point this out (1848– 1880), and the universal nature of chiral symmetry breaking in DNA and RNA is now very well established for all life forms. Figure 1 and 2 show how the homochirality is manifest at the molecular level. We note that amino acids are L and DNA is largely D handed. With the discovery of parity violation within charged current reactions in 1956, and of the weak neutral currents (WNCs) in 1973, two universal symmetry-breaking processes (WNC and β-decay) were uncovered that could have determined the handedness of DNA and RNA. The main problem is the extremely small symmetry-breaking effects (∆E/kB T ~