New Developments in the Origins of the Homochirality of Biologically Relevant Molecules

Abstract

Perhaps it is the intrinsic chirality at the level of elementary particles that accounts for why relevant biomolecules (proteinogenic amino acids and sugar units in the nucleic acids) are homochiral. This is suggested by new results concerning the difference in energy of enantiomers resulting from parity violation of electroweak interactions and the finding of asymmetric autocatalysis as an efficient model for the amplification of small enantiomeric excesses.