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| Appendix A. Tutorial 5. Chirality Roadblock 14. discusses chirality, or handedness. Consider a molecule of aspartic acid. There are actually two ways it can be built. These two ways are mirror images of each other. It turns out that aspartic acid is a very common amino acid used throughout all living organisms. It also flips back and forth between its chiral states fairly rapidly, with an average time being flips of somewhere around 1,000 years. Some of the long chains of molecules needed for life may contain 20 or 30 aspartic acid molecules, sometimes there are even more. The chiral flip of a single aspartic acid molecule can destroy the usefulness of an entire chain. So, it is hard for such a chain to have a stable shape for more than 30 to 50 years. This instability is one of the major roadblocks to a natural formation of life. We will talk some more about why this problem is so serious in Roadblock 14. |