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A remarkable hallmark of Nature is its inherent lack of left-right symmetry across all scales of size and complexity, from elementary particles up to macroscopic systems such as animals, plants and flowers. One of the questions raised by Nature propensity to favour one handedness over the other concerns the correlation of dissymmetry across different levels of complexity. Because Nature's complexity arises through self-assembling of molecules and macromolecules into organisms whose structure, symmetry features and functions are controlled by non-covalent interactions, we employ a dye-surfactant assembly as a model system. Using circular dichroism spectroscopy combined with molecular dynamics simulations we show that the chirality of complex systems can be modulated by non-chiral molecules such as polyamines. This finding provides a different framework for exploring the transmission of chirality, suggesting that non-chiral metabolites may also contribute to chiral shaping.
Ceccacci et al. (Thu,) studied this question.