Spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in a random driven chemical system

William D. Piñeros and Tsvi Tlusty ()
Additional contact information
William D. Piñeros: Institute for Basic Science (IBS)
Tsvi Tlusty: Institute for Basic Science (IBS)

Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Living systems have evolved to efficiently consume available energy sources using an elaborate circuitry of chemical reactions which, puzzlingly, bear a strict restriction to asymmetric chiral configurations. While autocatalysis is known to promote such chiral symmetry breaking, whether a similar phenomenon may also be induced in a more general class of configurable chemical systems—via energy exploitation—is a sensible yet underappreciated possibility. This work examines this question within a model of randomly generated complex chemical networks. We show that chiral symmetry breaking may occur spontaneously and generically by harnessing energy sources from external environmental drives. Key to this transition are intrinsic fluctuations of achiral-to-chiral reactions and tight matching of system configurations to the environmental drives, which together amplify and sustain diverged enantiomer distributions. These asymmetric states emerge through steep energetic transitions from the corresponding symmetric states and sharply cluster as highly-dissipating states. The results thus demonstrate a generic mechanism in which energetic drives may give rise to homochirality in an otherwise totally symmetrical environment, and from an early-life perspective, might emerge as a competitive, energy-harvesting advantage.

Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29952-8 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:13:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-022-29952-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-29952-8

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().