Chemical Models for Understanding the Emergence of Homo-Chirality of Phospholipids for Origin of Life Studies

Abstract

In the prebiotic world, the chemical assembly of biotic building blocks led to racemic mixtures; however, homo-chirality emerged in the racemic prebiotic soup. Polymers and other molecules assembled from mixtures of enantiomers rather than racemic ones. Understanding how symmetry breaking happens is one of the most challenging fields of research in origin of life studies. With this article, we aim to shed light on one of the problems: in the absence of physical examples for use in a laboratory scale, what are the best models to use to simulate the conditions and lead to homo-chiral symmetry breaking? In this perspective, we suggest looking to chemical models that can represent a poorly studied class of prebiotic compounds in the context of symmetry breaking: the phospholipids.

Keywords

• origin of life
• homo-chirality emergence
• symmetry breaking
• archaea phospholipid models
• crystallization
• preferential crystallization