{"id":212977,"date":"2025-05-01T09:10:20","date_gmt":"2025-05-01T14:10:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/how-calcium-may-have-unlocked-the-origins-of-lifes-molecular-asymmetry"},"modified":"2025-05-01T09:10:20","modified_gmt":"2025-05-01T14:10:20","slug":"how-calcium-may-have-unlocked-the-origins-of-lifes-molecular-asymmetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/how-calcium-may-have-unlocked-the-origins-of-lifes-molecular-asymmetry","title":{"rendered":"How calcium may have unlocked the origins of life\u2019s molecular asymmetry"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/how-calcium-may-have-unlocked-the-origins-of-lifes-molecular-asymmetry.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A new study led by researchers at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the Institute of Science, Tokyo, has uncovered a surprising role for calcium in shaping life\u2019s earliest molecular structures. Their findings suggest that calcium ions can selectively influence how primitive polymers form, shedding light on a long-standing mystery: how life\u2019s molecules came to prefer a single \u201chandedness\u201d (chirality).<\/p>\n<p>The study is published in <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1073\/pnas.2419554122\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Like our left and right hands, many molecules exist in two mirror-image forms. Yet life on Earth has a striking preference: DNA\u2019s sugars are right-handed, while proteins are built from left-handed <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/amino+acids\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">amino acids<\/a>. This phenomenon, called homochirality, is essential for life as we know it\u2014but how it first emerged remains a major puzzle in origins of life research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new study led by researchers at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the Institute of Science, Tokyo, has uncovered a surprising role for calcium in shaping life\u2019s earliest molecular structures. Their findings suggest that calcium ions can selectively influence how primitive polymers form, shedding light on a long-standing mystery: how life\u2019s molecules came to [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-212977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212977\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}