1. Could you explain the significance of your article to the non-specialist?

Many important biomolecules such as amino acids and sugars occur in Nature as only one of their non-identical mirror-image pairs, which is a general phenomenon called biological chirality. It has been known for some decades that the mirror-image pairs have slightly different total energies because of a physical phenomenon called parity violation. This article extends the probability theory used for describing chemical reactions and shows that the small energy difference cannot be the reason why biological chirality occurs.

2. What has motivated you to conduct this work? 

The emergence of biological chirality is an intensely discussed topic in the present scientific literature. The possible role of parity violation in determining biological chirality has been controversial. Whereas parity violation seems to favor the naturally occurring enantiomers consistently, the energy differences are extremely small. Almost all earlier kinetic arguments pro and contra have been based on a deterministic approach to chemical kinetics. However, it seems to have been forgotten that parity violation energy differences are smaller than natural stochastic fluctuations, and only stochastic models can give really meaningful conclusions.

3. Where do you see this work developing in the future?

Many of the enantioselective autocatalytic models published in the literature should be reinvestigated by the stochastic kinetic approach used in this work because it is already clear that results obtained by the deterministic approach are not satisfactory.

4. Are there any particular challenges facing future research in this area?

Parity violation energy differences are still in silico results and it would be important to confirm them experimentally. On the other hand, finding more stochastic autocatalytic chemical processes similar to the Soai reactions is also needed for better experimental basis of the theoretical models used for the emergence of biological chirality.