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Updated: Jun 10, 2025

A Micropatterning Assay for Measuring Cell Chirality
Published on: March 11, 2022
Step-by-Step Towards Biological Homochirality - from Prebiotic Randomness To Perfect Asymmetry
Ivana Mejdrová1, Ewa Węgrzyn1, Thomas Carell1
1Department of Chemistry, Institute for Chemical Epigenetics (ICE-M), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) München, Butenandtstrasse 5-13, 81377, Munich, Germany.
Abstract:
The history of life's formation and the origin of its stereochemistry are nearly as multifaceted as the life itself. In this review, we focus on analyzing the step-by-step path leading to what we can define as "life" in parallel to what we know about the emergence of enantiomeric imbalance and subsequent transition to full homochirality. We start at the level of assembly of the building blocks of life from inorganic molecules and build up to the polymerization and formation of nucleic acids and peptides. We report and analyze different theories at various stages of this development and try to elucidate the most plausible theory.
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