How molecular “handedness” emerged in early biology
Senior author Donna Blackmond, PhD, and co-first authors Jinhan Yu and Min Deng, PhD, of the recent Nature study. Credit: Scripps Research Scripps Research chemists fill a major gap in origin-of-life theories. LA JOLLA, CA — Molecules often have a structural asymmetry called chirality, which means they can appear in alternative, mirror-image versions, akin to the left and right versions of human hands. One of the great mysteries about the origins of life on Earth is that virtually all of the fundamental