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NASA: Mystery of Life's Handedness Deepens
The mystery of why life uses molecules with specific orientations has deepened with a NASA-funded discovery that RNA — a key molecule thought to have
“The experiment demonstrated that ribozymes can favor either left- or right-handed amino acids, indicating that RNA worlds, in general, would not necessarily have a strong bias for the form of amino acids we observe in biology now,” said Irene Chen, of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Samueli School of Engineering, corresponding author of the Nature Communications paper. “The findings suggest that life’s eventual homochirality might not be a result of chemical determinism but could have emerged through later evolutionary pressures,” said co-author Alberto Vázquez-Salazar, a UCLA postdoctoral scholar and member of Chen’s research group. Dworkin is the project scientist on NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, which extracted samples from the asteroid Bennu and delivered them to Earth last year for further study.
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