Requirement of chiral excess for the origin of life

Ascertain whether a pre-existing chiral excess was required as a prerequisite for the origin of life, or whether the origin-of-life event itself generated chiral molecules and initiated one or more chiral phase transitions.

Background

The paper examines how metabolic network expansion from achiral precursors could yield abundant chiral molecules and explores a potential achiral-to-chiral transition in chemical space. This motivates a fundamental question about the causal role of chirality in life's emergence: was chirality a necessary antecedent, or did it arise concomitantly with early metabolic organization?

Resolving this question would bridge metabolism-first and genetics-first scenarios and inform experimental searches for symmetry-breaking mechanisms relevant to prebiotic chemistry.