Professor Naoki Watanabe's group at Hokkaido University has confirmed through experiments that optically active amino acids can be produced at a low temperature of -261 ° C.Amino acids are substances that are indispensable materials for proteins in life, but the process of their initial creation remained a mystery.It was thought that it was made on cryogenic particles in the dark nebula of the universe, but in this experiment we confirmed that amino acids were made in a similar environment.
From the press release
When an amino acid called glycine, which has no optical activity, is reacted with a special hydrogen atom, it becomes optically active.However, it has been thought that this reaction only occurs in environments above -173 ° C.This is because thermal energy is needed to overcome the energy barrier.This time, I tried to cause this reaction at an extremely low temperature of -261 ° C.Then, a phenomenon called the tunnel effect, which slips through the energy wall, occurred and succeeded in giving glycine optical activity.
This raises the possibility that the optical activity of amino acids was acquired in the dark nebula.However, it remains unclear why life has only one of the right-handed and left-handed types.In this research, we will approach the mystery of why there are only one-handed molecules in nature.
