Mechanical Aspect of Chirality and its Biological Significance

Gideon Gilat

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Mechanical Aspect of Chirality and its Biological Significance

Gideon Gilat

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Abstract

Chirality is not just a structural artifact in biology but it may provide for a genuine biological advantage. This is due to the phenomenon of chiral interaction (CI) which is described here for mechanical-chiral devices. The main mechanical feature of chiral interaction is its mode of selecting one direction of rotation out of two possible and opposite ones. For example, a given chiral device such as a rotating water sprinkler, rotates in one direction. What does rotate in the opposite direction is the mirror of this given sprinkler. This mode of operation indicates space-time (PT) invariance which causes it to be also time-irreversible. This also causes a chiral device to become non-ergodic on microscopic level. This prevents certain chiral systems from readily reaching thermal equilibrium, and causes the system to act non-ergodically, which is crucial for living systems as well as for molecular evolution.

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Gideon Gilat. 1999-04-14. Mechanical Aspect of Chirality and its Biological Significance. https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/9904026

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