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Biological systems are homochiral, raising the question of how a racemicmixture of prebiotically synthesized biomolecules could attain a homochiralstate at the network level. Based on our recent results, we aim to address arelated question of how chiral information might have flowed in a prebioticnetwork. Utilizing the crystallization properties of the central RNA precursorknown as ribose-aminooxazoline (RAO), we showed that its homochiral crystalscan be obtained from its fully racemic solution on a magnetic mineral surface,due to the chiral-induced spin selectivity (CISS) effect. Moreover, weuncovered a mechanism facilitated by the CISS effect through which chiralmolecules, like RAO, can uniformly magnetize such surfaces in a variety ofplanetary environments in a persistent manner. All this is very tantalizing,because recent experiments with tRNA analogs demonstrate high stereoselectivityin the attachment of L-amino acids to D-ribonucleotides, enabling the transferof homochirality from RNA to peptides. Therefore the biological homochiralityproblem may be reduced to ensuring that a single common RNA precursor (e.g.RAO) can be made homochiral. The emergence of homochirality at RAO then allowsfor the chiral information to propagate through RNA, then to peptides, andultimately, through enantioselective catalysis, to metabolites. Thisdirectionality of the chiral information flow parallels that of the centraldogma of molecular biology--the unidirectional transfer of genetic informationfrom nucleic acids to proteins.

The central dogma of biological homochirality: How does chiral information propagate in a prebiotic network?