Biomolecules: the origin of their optical activity.

The origin of biomolecular optical activity is a problem that has been wide open since the days of Pasteur. A most promising approach attributes a causal function to optically active minerals (1). It has been proposed that pyrite, crystallized at comparatively low temperature, has a non-cubic crystal structure (2, 3) which would indeed be optically active. It has further been proposed that the formation of pyrite may be linked with early carbon fixation (4, 5, 6). It is here shown that these two proposals jointly could offer a straightforward explanation for the origin of optically active biomolecules.