Mechanical Aspect of Chirality and its Biological Significance
| dc.creator | Gilat, Gideon | |
| dc.date | 1999-04-14 | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2026-07-07T05:56:53Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2026-07-07T05:56:53Z | |
| dc.description | Chirality is not just a structural artifact in biology but it may provide for a genuine biological advantage. This is due to the phenomenon of chiral interaction (CI) which is described here for mechanical-chiral devices. The main mechanical feature of chiral interaction is its mode of selecting one direction of rotation out of two possible and opposite ones. For example, a given chiral device such as a rotating water sprinkler, rotates in one direction. What does rotate in the opposite direction is the mirror of this given sprinkler. This mode of operation indicates space-time (PT) invariance which causes it to be also time-irreversible. This also causes a chiral device to become non-ergodic on microscopic level. This prevents certain chiral systems from readily reaching thermal equilibrium, and causes the system to act non-ergodically, which is crucial for living systems as well as for molecular evolution. | |
| dc.description | 16 pages, 1 figure | |
| dc.identifier | https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/9904026 | |
| dc.identifier | http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/9904026 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/87778 | |
| dc.subject | Biological Physics | |
| dc.subject | Chemical Physics | |
| dc.subject | Quantitative Biology | |
| dc.title | Mechanical Aspect of Chirality and its Biological Significance | |
| dc.type | text |