Chirality change by grinding crystals in solution

Abstract

One of the greatest unsolved problems in chemistry is the origin of homochirality in the biosphere, that is, the fact that l-amino acids and d-sugars dominate in biology, while laboratory experiments with stereoselective reactions only produce racemic mixtures. Several models have been proposed to address the question of how enantiomerically pure solutions or crystalline phases could have emerged from a presumably racemic prebiotic world. Here we show that two populations of amino acid crystals of "left" and "right" hand cannot coexist in solution: one of the chiral populations disappears in an irreversible autocatalytic process that nurtures the other one. Final and complete chiral purity seems to be an inexorable fate in our systems, under grinding, in the course of the common process of growth-dissolution. This unexpected chiral symmetry breaking has become firmly established but the underlying mechanism is being debated and we have no definitive answer.