Mechanical Aspect of Chirality and its Biological Significance

Details Mechanical Aspect of Chirality and its Biological Significance Mechanical Aspect of Chirality and its Biological Significance

1999-04-14

arxiv.org/abs/physics/9904026v1

Physics

Biological Physics

16 pages, 1 figure

Scientific paper

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.

Affiliated with

Also associated with

No associations

Rating

Mechanical Aspect of Chirality and its Biological Significance does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with Mechanical Aspect of Chirality and its Biological Significance, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Mechanical Aspect of Chirality and its Biological Significance will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

Comments { 0 }

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-389169