French chemist Louis Pasteur discovered in 1848 that certain molecules have copies of the same structure but mirrored in space. This is called chirality, after the Greek word for hand, and is applied when there is left and right copying of something in physics, biology, or chemistry.
In the case of biochemistry, chirality is indicated separately in the molecule’s formula (R on the right, S on the left) and is of great importance because organisms use only one of the two copies. The information bases, DNA and RNA, are all left-handed, while amino acids and proteins are all left-handed. Until now, it was a mystery why. Pasteur had previously speculated that the difference between the two versions was due to the influence of magnetic fields, and it might then turn out that his train of thought was in the right direction.
Harvard physicist Dimitar Sasilov now offers a solution to the problem in three scientific articles. According to him, the magnetic minerals of the young Earth are key to the story.
magnetic magic
One part of the secret is that a large amount of molecules with the same symmetry were required to create life, and the question is what mechanism filtered it out. Previous scientific ideas have suggested the effect of cosmic rays, or polarized light.
One element of Sasilov’s interpretation comes from 1999 research conducted by the Weizmann Institute by Ron Nauman. Nauman found that in mirror images, the spins of the electrons are opposite, so their magnetic affinity is also opposite. Thus, a given molecule is attracted to a magnetic field of opposite polarity than its mirror image.
Another element of decoding is the paper published in 2009 by Matthew Bowner, a fellow at the University of Manchester, in which he investigated the mystery of RNA pairing and described a ribo-aminooxazoline (RAO-) crystal, the structure of which has only one chirality of The nucleotides that make up the RNA versions.
Following the latter idea, Sasilov studied whether it was possible to create a surface on which compounds would accumulate on one side only with RAO attached to the magnetic rocks. They conducted an experiment in which a mineral called magnetite was amplified by an external magnetic field and observed as a solution containing right and left RAO.
In 60 percent, only one side of the crystal is deposited.
This phenomenon occurred in the same way with the opposite RAO, resulting in a polarity reversal.
In another paper, Sasilov’s research group describes how the resulting one-sided transfer into amino acids and proteins via RNA produced on the surface of RAO.
Professional criticism objected to the fact that magnetism is 6,500 times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field in the experiment. Sasilov defended this by saying that the magnetic effect of the RAO surface continually increases as the crystals grow, and in fact it took hundreds of thousands of years for this phenomenon to occur.
Another problem with decoding is that it only works with two nucleotides, cytosine and uracil, but not with adenine and guanine. Even if the solution is not perfect, because of the business logic, it feels like we are only one step away from the complete solution.
(Sciences)
