Abstract：
One of the fundamental challenges in the origins of life is to understand how life originated the way it is and if the origin happened again, would it be any different?
Homochirality is a distinct property of living matter manifested by the unichiral molecular units of the biopolymers. This selection is presumed to be an important step towards the origin of self-organization leading to the emergence of life. Different molecular subunits and their precursors have been proven to form under various prebiotic conditions in racemic form (50:50 ratio of d- and l-enantiomers). Molecular symmetry may have been broken before life began resulting in enantiomeric imbalance. As a consequence, life-as-we-known-it uses exclusively l-amino acids and d-sugars for the molecular architecture of proteins and nucleic acids.
The questions studied by our group are: "What is the nature of the first symmetry breaking influence?" "Are the prebioticaly relevant systems that can induce enantiomeric excess from initially racemic mixtures?" "If life were to originate again would it use the same set of homochiral units?". Those questions will be answered from the point of view of "photochirogenesis," the induction of chirality using light. In this model, the interaction of circularly polarized light with racemic molecules generated in the interstellar medium is considered as the main driving force of enantiomeric discrimination in prebiotic evolution.