Chemical and Physical Models for the Emergence of Biological Homochirality

Abstract

The past several decades have witnessed the development of a number of different experimental approaches to help understand how the homochirality of biological molecules might have evolved in a prebiotic world. This chapter reviews chemical and physical models with a special focus on recent developments in attrition-enhanced deracemization of conglomerates, a process that combines solution phase chemical interconversion of enantiomers with thermodynamic and kinetic considerations of solubility, crystal growth, and dissolution.