Competitive exclusion principle in ecology and absolute asymmetric synthesis in chemistry

The key concepts underlying the Frank model (1953) for spontaneous asymmetric synthesis in chemistry are traced back to the pioneering works of Volterra (1926) and Lotka (1932) on biological species competition. The Lotka-Volterra (L-V) two-species exclusive competition model reduces to the Frank model for the special case of distinguishable but degenerate species (i.e., the enantiomers). The important ecological principle of competitive exclusion, originally derived from the L-V two-competitors model, is a consequence of sufficiently antagonistic interactions between the species competing for limited common resources, or mutual inhibition, as the term is known in the chemical literature on absolute asymmetric synthesis. The L-V and Frank models are described by the same general differential equations, nevertheless a crucial thermodynamic distinction between these models is necessary to correlate ecological selection and chemical selectivity arising from 1) the absence of reversibility in biological transformations, in marked contrast to chemical reactions, and 2) the constraints in chemical scenarios on the reaction rate constants required to fulfill the principle of micro-reversibility.