Spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in a random driven chemical system.

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

SUBMITTER: Pineros WD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9042824 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature