Speaker
Description
The single chirality of the amino acids and sugars that make up the building blocks
of life has fascinated scientists and laymen alike since Pasteur’s first painstaking
separation of the enantiomorphic crystals of a tartrate salt over 150 years ago.
Autocatalytic self-replication has been highlighted as a potential route to
rationalize how one enantiomer might have come to dominate over the other from
what presumably was a racemic prebiotic world. Frank’s theoretical
demonstration of this concept has to date been verified in only one case, the
prebiotically implausible Soai reaction. We recently demonstrated how two
reactions, the dipeptide-catalyzed transamination to produce enantioenriched
amino acids, and the thiol-catalyzed ligation of amino acids to produce dipeptides,
might be combined to produce a prebiotically plausible network for chiral
amplification.