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Origins of life

A left-handed Solar System?

Nature volume 389, pages 234–235 (1997)Cite this article

How and why did life on Earth come to use almost exclusively laevorotatory, or left-handed amino acids (l-enantiomers), rather than their mirror-image dextrorotatory, or right-handed forms (d-enantiomers)? The paper by Engel and Macko on page 265of this issue1 re-examines the Murchison meteorite, and reinforces the surprising result that some process favouring l-enantiomers seems to have operated before the origin of life on Earth, and probably before the formation of the Solar System. If this is correct, our Solar System may have formed with a built-in bias for left-handed amino acids.

An excess of l-enantiomers is an intriguing result, as it suggests that the handedness, or chirality, of terrestrial biology might have an extraterrestrial cause. But an l-excess indigenous to the meteorite is difficult to prove, as it may instead be due to contamination by the terrestrial biosphere of an originally racemic mixture. (In a racemic mixture, l- and d-enantiomers are present in equal abundance, as in typical laboratory chemical syntheses of amino acids.)

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Figure 1: Left- and right-handed versions of the amino acid alanine.

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  1. the Department of Planetary Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, 85721, Arizona, USA

    Christopher F. Chyba

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Chyba, C. A left-handed Solar System?. Nature 389, 234–235 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/38392

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