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Couldn’t there exist a chirality filter on earth?
by wjnc 2y ago
Couldn’t there exist a chirality filter on earth?
- XorNot 2y agoThe question is "how?" though. The chirality filter on Earth is basically Earth-life: it almost ubiquitously creates left-handed amino acids. But all known chemical ways of doing this produce racemic mixtures of both types. If we found say, a high pressure synthesis method which was heavily biased chirally, then that would be good evidence but none has been discovered.
- nkrisc 2y agoIs there any evidence of one or such a theory?
- wjnc 2y agoI am a total noob in chemistry and Claude said that it was a great question, but the answer were quite unclear about the feasibility. Mainly theoretical filters on lab scale. So that led me to put forward the thought.
- jerf 2y agoNobody has found or even so much as proposed a very good one. There's a bare handful of reactions that can tend to amplify chirality, but most uncontrolled chemistry (including things like Miller-Urey) produce a biologically-useless random high-entropy mix, and it is fairly unclear that these handful of reactions, which aren't even necessarily obviously useful ones and require some fairly special conditions, could possibly overwhelm the entropy of all the other reactions blasting out random combinations of things. AFAIK there isn't even a known way to start with "normal chemicals" and produce highly-chiral reactions reliably in the lab. We get all our chiral molecules by extracting them from biology.
- pfdietz 2y agoI think it should be possible to separate stereoisomers by crystallization, at least in some cases. You then have to sort through the crystals.