Shedding light on the origin of chirality on Earth
An enantioenrichment of the amino acid valine, which could shed light on the origin of chirality on Earth, has been achieved by scientists in Spain. Reporting in Chemical Communications, Cristóbal Viedma and colleagues showed that they have been able to amplify the enantiomeric excess of valine, one of life’s building blocks. Valine has been found in meteorite samples.
The team sublimated a racemic mixture of valine. When the valine condensed, it formed a conglomerate. A conglomerate is a mixture of crystals formed by pure enantiomers – the pure crystals can be extracted from the mixture. The group found that when they continued to heat the flask, this amplified the initial enantiomeric excess. ‘One can imagine similar processes occurring near volcanoes where temperature gradients are enormous and such scenarios would have been plausible on primitive Earth,’ said Viedma.
Original publication: C Viedma, W L Noorduin, J E Ortiz, T de Torres and P Cintas, Chem. Commun., 2010.
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