Source abstract
Abstract
Facing the scientific question of the origin of chirality in life, water is considered to play a crucial role in driving many biologically relevant processes in vivo. Water has been demonstrated in vitro to be related to chiral generation, amplification, and inversion, while the underlying mechanism is still not fully understood. Real-space evidence at the single-molecule level is thus urgently required to understand the role of water molecules in biomolecular chirality related issues. Herein, we choose one of the RNA bases, the biomolecule uracil (U), which self-assembles into racemic hydrogen-bonded structures. Upon water exposure, surprisingly, racemic structures could be transformed to homochiral water-involved structures, resulting in an unexpected chiral separation on the surface. The origin of chiral separation is due to preferential binding between water and the specific site of U molecules, which leads to the formation of the energetically most favorable homochiral (U–H2O–U)2 cluster as seed for subsequent chiral amplification. Such a water-driven self-assembly process may also be extended to other biologically relevant systems such as amino acids and sugars, which would provide general insights into the role that water molecules may play in the origin of homochirality in vivo.
Source: openalex_inverted_index · Quality: baseline
Affiliations
Interdisciplinary Materials Research Center, College of Materials Science and Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, People’s Republic of China
CAS Key Laboratory of Standardization and Measurement for Nanotechnology, CAS Center for Excellence in Nanoscience, National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, Beijing 100190, People’s Republic of China
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, People’s Republic of China
School of Future Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, People’s Republic of China
Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale & Department of Chemical Physics, iChEM, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, People’s Republic of China
Institute of Functional Nano & Soft Materials (FUNSOM), Jiangsu Key Laboratory for Carbon-Based Functional Materials and Devices, Joint International Research Laboratory of Carbon-Based Functional Materials and Devices, Soochow University, Suzhou 215123, People’s Republic of China
Funding
Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China · National Natural Science Foundation of China · Chinese Academy of Sciences
References (42)
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