this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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Makes me wonder how all life came to use exclusively L-protiens.
Perhaps there was once a time where they both existed on the primordial earth, and natural selection preferred one over the other.
Given enough time, a fitness-neutral variant will tend to fixation due to drift alone, unless there are density-dependent effects (i.e., unless being relatively rare increases fitness). The article is concerned that there may be some such effect, but the extinction of any primordial chiral life suggests that there isn’t.
I read about it a while ago. Apparently, right-chiradial proteins can't produce some molecules the left ones can or react entirely different. I guess lc was just more practical?
Or one just happened to get access to a resource first (e.g. large clump of nutrients) and just grew faster.