French chemist Louis Pasteur thought magnetic fields might somehow explain “homochirality,” but its origin has remained one of biology’s great mysteries. Now, it turns out Pasteur may have been onto something.
In 1848, French chemist Louis Pasteur discovered that some molecules essential for life exist in mirror image forms, much like our left and right hands. Today, we know biology chooses just one of these “chiral” forms: DNA, RNA, and their building blocks are all right-handed, whereas amino acids and proteins are all left-handed.
Over the past century, researchers have proposed various mechanisms for skewing the first biomolecules, including cosmic rays and polarized light. Both can cause an initial bias favoring either right- or left-handed molecules, but they don’t directly explain how this initial bias was amplified to create the large reservoirs of chiral molecules likely needed to make the first cells.
Now, Sasselov and his colleagues have put these two pieces together. They wondered whether magnetic surfaces might favor a single RAO chiral form. To find out, they turned to magnetite, a magnetic mineral that is common in Earth’s crust. They applied a strong external magnetic field, aligning electron spins in the magnetite and strengthening its magnetism.
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