UBI seminar (小林研究室開催) 2022年4月11日(月) 13:15-14:45
Place:駒場IIキャンパス 生産技術研究所 C棟 Ce503
& Zoom (※研究室等で配信されたURLを参照)
Speaker: Davd Lacoste (ESPCI, Paris)
Title: Emergence of homochirality in large molecular systems
Abstract: The question of the origin of homochirality of living matter, or the
dominance of one handedness for all molecules of life
across the entire biosphere, is a long-standing puzzle in the research
on the Origin of Life. In the fifties, Frank proposed
a mechanism to explain homochirality based on the properties of a
simple autocatalytic network containing only a few
chemical species. Following this work, chemists struggled to find
experimental realizations of this model, possibly due
to a lack of proper methods to identify autocatalysis [1]. In any
case, a model based on a few chemical species seems rather
limited, because prebiotic earth is likely to have consisted of
complex ‘soups’ of chemicals.
To include this aspect of the problem, we recently proposed a
mechanism based on certain features of
large out-of-equilibrium chemical networks [2]. We showed that a
phase transition towards an homochiral state is likely to occur as the
number of chiral species in the system becomes large or as the amount
of free energy injected into the system increases. Through an analysis
of large chemical databases, we showed that there is no need for very
large molecules for chiral species to dominate over achiral ones; it
already happens when molecules contain about 10 heavy atoms. We also
analyzed the various conventions used to measure chirality and
discussed the relative chiral signs adopted by different groups of
molecules [3]. We then proposed a generalization of Frank's model for
large chemical networks, which we characterized using random matrix
theory.
This analysis includes sparse networks, suggesting that the emergence
of homochirality is a robust and generic transition.
References:
[1] A. Blokhuis, D. Lacoste, and P. Nghe, PNAS (2020), 117, 25230.
[2] G. Laurent, D. Lacoste, and P. Gaspard, PNAS (2021) 118 (3) e2012741118.
[3] G. Laurent, D. Lacoste, and P. Gaspard, Proc. R. Soc. A 478:20210590 (2022).