Chirality-induced avalanche magnetization of magnetite by an RNA precursor

Creators: Ozturk, S. Furkan¹; Bhowmick, Deb Kumar²; Kapon, Yael³; Sang, Yutao²; Kumar, Anil²; Paltiel, Yossi³; Naaman, Ron²; Sasselov, Dimitar D.¹

1. Harvard University
2. Weizmann Institute of Science
3. Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Abstract

Homochirality is a hallmark of life on Earth. To achieve and maintain homochirality within a prebiotic network, the presence of an environmental factor acting as a chiral agent and providing a persistent chiral bias to prebiotic chemistry is highly advantageous. Magnetized surfaces are prebiotically plausible chiral agents due to the chiral-induced spin selectivity (CISS) effect, and they were utilized to attain homochiral ribose-aminooxazoline (RAO), an RNA precursor. However, natural magnetic minerals are typically weakly magnetized, necessitating mechanisms to enhance their magnetization for their use as effective chiral agents. Here, we report the magnetization of magnetic surfaces by crystallizing enantiopure RAO, whereby chiral molecules induce a uniform surface magnetization due to the CISS effect, which spreads across the magnetic surface akin to an avalanche. Chirality-induced avalanche magnetization enables a feedback between chiral molecules and magnetic surfaces, which can amplify a weak magnetization and allow for highly efficient spin-selective processes on magnetic minerals.

Copyright and License

© The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Acknowledgement

The authors thank John Sutherland and Jack Szostak for helpful discussions, suggestions, and feedback. We thank Ziwei Liu for the synthesis of RAO samples. We also acknowledge other members of the Simons Collaboration on the Origins of Life and the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative for fruitful discussions that shaped the ideas behind this work. This work was supported by a grant from the Simons Foundation 290360 to D.D.S.

Data Availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request. The X-ray crystallographic coordinates for structures reported in this study have been deposited at the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC), under deposition numbers 2220348 and 2220349. These data can be obtained free of charge from The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre via www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/data_request/cif.

Supplemental Material

Supplementary Information

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