HOFFMANN , Søren V.

All life on Earth is characterized by its asymmetry – both the genetic material and proteins are composed of homochiral monomers. Understanding how this molecular asymmetry initially arose is a key question related to the origins of life. Cometary ice simulations, L-enantiomeric enriched amino acids in meteorites and the detection of circularly...

Circularly polarized light (CPL) is known to be a true chiral entity capable of generating absolute molecular asymmetry. However, the degree of inducible optical activity depends on the λ of the incident CPL. Exposure of amorphous films of rac-alanine to tunable CPL led to enantiomeric excesses (ee) which not only follow the helicity but also...

We detected ribose and related sugars in the organic residues of simulated interstellar ices using multidimensional gas chromatography. Kawai questions the formation of sugar compounds in the ices and suggests that they arise from a classical formose reaction during sample workup for analysis. We disagree with this hypothesis and present...

This folder includes:*Supplementary Material (.pdf)(Materials and Methods, Figs. S1–S6, Table S1, caption for movie S1)Other supplementary materials available for this manuscript: *Movie S1 (.mp4)*GC×GC chromatograms of ice sample and blank recorded with LECO Corp ChromaTOFTM (.peg)

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