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Homochirality: Why Nature Never Makes Mirror Molecules

Steve Mould

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  • Recommended by 3 people, in Hacker News, across 3 different months.
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Assumes interest and some biology. Education, not medical advice.

1.7M views6 years ago3 recommendations

How the body worksCells and molecules

Steve Mould explains homochirality, the phenomenon where biological molecules like sugars and amino acids only exist in one of two mirror-image forms.

The first 500 people to use this link will get 2 free months of Skillshare Premium Membership: skl.sh/stevemould10 Molecules of biological origin always have a fixed handedness or chirality. For example you only ever see right handed sugars and left handed amino acids in nature. But why? Credits: Meteorite image - Art Bromage - commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Murchison_meteorite.jpg RNA and DNA images - Sponk - commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Difference_DNA_RNA-EN.svg Viking lander video - MASA You can buy my books here: stevemould.com/books You can support me on Patreon here: patreon.com/stevemould just like these amazing people: Joseph Galliera Nathan Williams Matthew Cocke Glenn Watson Mark Brouwer Joseph Rocca Joël van der Loo Doug Peterson Yuh Saito Rashid Al M Andrew Reeder Twitter: twitter.com/moulds Instagram: instagram.com/stevemouldscience/ Facebook: facebook.com/stevemouldscience/ Buy nerdy maths things: mathsgear.co.uk

Why it's here

3 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended for its clear explanation of molecular chirality and why biological molecules have a specific handedness.

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…gar is homochiral. Later in the video he describes how you can filter enantiomers by finding an enzyme in nature that 'eats' the undesired enantiomer, finding the DNA for it, and coercing bacteria into producing that enzyme. This seems quite complicated and potentially out of reach for a clandestine drug-making operation. Is there another way? 1 link to this video…
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Your question reminded me of this video about "Homochirality: Why Nature Never Makes Mirror Molecules"1 - even though it's not directly related I think it may be interesting to you. 1 link to this video
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On “Pristine meteorite found within hours of hitting Earth”

Here is a video talking about molecular chirality and how nature really only produces one version of molecules link to this video . If it picked up the molecules in the atmosphere those atmospheric molecules should have been made by life on earth and those have a handedness bias depending on the molecule, some are produced right handed only or left handed only because they are made one atom at a time and need to be one handed for life to use them. Abiotic synthesis produces a 50/50 bias of left and right handed molecules because they are made all at once.
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