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- Why is Life Left-Handed? The Science of Chirality Explained
Why is Life Left-Handed? The Science of Chirality Explained
Discover how the molecular structures of life on Earth exhibit a unique asymmetry known as chirality, and why scientists are making progress in understanding this fundamental aspect of biological chemistry.
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Video Transcript
Biology is really chemistry and chemistry is really physics, so basically everything is physics.
If everything is physics, how come that our DNA twists one way and not the other?
The molecular structure of life in our planet has what's known as a hindriness.
It's not many organic molecules have an orientation, but just how come that this hindriness came out this way and not that way?
It might sound like that's a question we might never be able to answer, but in the past couple of months,
scientists have actually made some progress. Let's have a look. We're used to writing molecules
in forms of the atomic elements they contain, like H2O, two hydrogens, one oxygen. But all molecules
are three-dimensional arrangements, and the interactions between the atoms give rise to specific
angles between them, in the end, which angles the molecule has is of course all a question of
quantum physics. The thing is now that for many molecules there isn't just one energetically ideal
three-dimensional arrangement, there are two. These two shapes are identical except for their
hindriness. The two shapes are mirror images to each other like two hands, hence the name,
though it's technically referred to as chirality. It means that you can't match them onto each other
by any rotation in space, you'd have to do a reflection on an imaginary mirror.
The weird thing is now that for what physics is concerned, these two hand-ed-nesses should
have the same probability of being created.
So how did life on our planet came out to have only one hand-ed-ness and not the other?
It's an interesting question not just because it's curious, but because if life evolved
and other planets, it'd be good to know whether it'd be likely to have the same handedness.
It'd also be good to know how this handedness came about for practical reasons,
which is that if one synthesizes molecule's ever-liberality, one might want to have only one
handedness because the other one might have very different biological effects.
The best example for the relevance of biological handedness is the tragic story of the Lidomite.
The Lidomite is a drug that came on the market in the 1950s and was sold under the brand name Conte
Garn.
It was recommended to pregnant women against morning sickness.
An estimated 10 to 20,000 babies were later born with birth defects caused by the drug.
It turned out that the Lidomite really contained two different molecules with the same composition,
but of the opposite hand-edness.
One of them was later linked to the birth defects.
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This question why biology has one orientation and not the other has been around since
the middle of the 19th century and scientists have made some progress on it in that they
tracked down the origin of bigger molecules, like DNA and RNA, to that of smaller molecules
and explained how one gave rise to another. But that still doesn't explain why at some
