One of those small, tough, building blocks in building a system to search for life.
Excellent work.
Handedness is important in biology.
Space agency NASA has created a test 10,000 times more sensitive than current technology to detect signs of life beyond Earth. Scientists hope to use the enhanced "capillary electrophoresis", an improvement on a three-decade old technique, in explorations of liquid-laden locales such as Europa where the test could help detect …
My (very wild) guess would be that aminoacids created by non-biological processes can be expected to have an even mix of chirality, while aminoacids synthesized by life forms are likely have a dominant chirality. This should be true even if it turns out that there are bi-chiral aliens, because the two forms would not have the same function and so would be unlikely to have the same concentration.
"the new test is tuned to detect left handed amino acids"
And not right-handed? That's assuming either that the alien life and Earth life are derived from the same original source, or that there's something that drives life to use left handed only.
It could be that it was pure chance that the First Replicator was left handed, in which case right handed is just as likely.
Unless there is some benefit to biological systems to use left chiral molecules in preference to right. AFAIK we do not know whether it is an historical accident or a mark of something fundamental. I suspect we will either have to create artificial life which uses right chiral molecules (a difficult but not impossible task) or find another genesis and see what the life there uses.
This is one of the fundamental questions that another genesis would address.
In an equilibrium system the two chiralities are likely to be equally probable. But Life is not an equilibrium system, it is a steady-state non-equilibrium system (SSNES). Or what my physics lecturers called a "dissipative system".
It is easy to imagine abiotic systems that are SSNES. For example, a steady stream of water (high pressure, high temperature) through volcanic rocks in a chemically reducing environment. My question is whether in such a SSNES one chirality could come to dominate.
Suitable experiments are needed.