"Cracking Chirality," a twelve-minute film from Chemistry Shorts™, explores how the essential molecules of life, like DNA, RNA, and proteins, acquired their homochiral structures and how magnetic rocks at the bottom of a prebiotic lake may have set the stage for life as we know it.
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Chirality is the idea that some molecules come in two mirror-image configurations. Despite having the exact same chemical compositions, their physical structures are different. These left-handed and right-handed molecules can have different properties and functions. Understanding how chiral molecules function differently is essential to chemical synthesis and medicine. But it also holds a curious question about early life: why are the nucleic acids that hold genetic information in all of life right-handed, while the amino acids that they encode left-handed?
In "Cracking Chirality ,” two Harvard University scientists, Dimitar Sasselov and S. Furkan Ozturk, present their exciting new findings: magnetized molecules found at the bottom of lakes on the primordial Earth may be the key to how important biological molecules crystallized and grew, tipping the scales from a 50-50 mixture of molecules to homochiral solutions made up of just one or the other. Their simple experimental setups, growing crystals on tiny magnetized plates, help provide a solution to an essential question about life itself that has plagued scientists for decades.
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“Cracking Chirality” is targeted towards high school and college students, and can be used as a starting point for discussions around the chemical origins of life, molecular chirality, electron spin, magnetism, and more. A full lesson plan with an experiment to accompany the film is available on the Chemistry Shorts YouTube Channel.
