Timing of the emergence of chiral selectivity during the origin of life

Determine when chiral selectivity first became important during the evolutionary transition from geochemistry to biochemistry in Earth's early history of life emergence.

Background

The paper frames chirality as a universal chemical property crucial to biological function and investigates how chiral molecules could have emerged within expanding metabolic networks. It introduces a chiral order parameter and identifies a phase-like transition in chemical and metabolic spaces, but does not resolve the historical timing of when chiral selectivity became evolutionarily significant.

Clarifying this timing would connect metabolic and genetics-first narratives in origins-of-life research and help locate when major molecular transitions (e.g., from predominantly achiral geochemistry to chiral-enriched biochemistry) occurred relative to LUCA.