Summary
Two recent reports in the literature claim thatl-aspartic acid polymerizes significantly faster thand-aspartic acid in the presence of kaolin in aqueous solution at 90°. The novelty of these observations and their potential significance for molecular evolution and the origin of optical activity in nature has prompted us to attempt a duplication of the experiments involved—using, however, analytical criteria which we felt would be more reliable than those previously employed. In our experimentsl- andd,l-aspartic acid in 0.01M solution were incubated with kaolin at 90° for 8 days. Careful examination of the aqueous residues from such experiments, however, failed to demonstrate any preferential polymerization ofl- overd-aspartic acid under the influence of kaolin, or indeed any significant gross polymerization of aspartic acid at all.
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Flores, J.J., Bonner, W.A. On the asymmetric polymerization of aspartic acid enantiomers by kaolin. J Mol Evol 3, 49–56 (1974). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01795975
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01795975