“Meeting of the Minds” Webinar
A newly designated “meeting of the minds” webinar will be organized on January 7, 2025 between 13:00-14:30. You are welcome to watch it at www.youtube.com/user/BilkentUniversitesi/live [1]. The speaker is Furkan Öztürk and the title of his talk is “A New Spin on the Origin of Biological Homochirality“.
This seminar is organized with the intention to expose participants to cutting-edge research and the underpinnings of a culture of creativity. It is an excellent opportunity to take a glimpse at how to build a successful career in research and scientific inquiry.
Please see below the abstract of the talk and a brief CV of the speaker.
Title: A New Spin on the Origin of Biological Homochirality
Abstract: Essential molecules of life are chiral; they exist in mirror-symmetrical pairs. However, biological systems exclusively use only one form of these pairs: right-handed sugars, along with left-handed amino acids. This phenomenon characterizes life as homochiral. The origins of this molecular asymmetry, however, remain elusive, and it is this long-standing mystery that I will address in my presentation. The chiral-induced spin selectivity (CISS) effect has established a strong coupling between electron spin and molecular chirality. This coupling paves the way for breaking the chiral molecular symmetry via spin-selective processes. Achiral magnetic surfaces, when spin-polarized, can function as chiral agents due to the CISS effect, serving as templates for the asymmetric crystallization of chiral molecules. We studied the spin-selective crystallization of racemic ribo-aminooxazoline (RAO), a central precursor of RNA and DNA, on magnetite surfaces–achieving homochirality in two crystallization steps. We also demonstrated the chirality-induced avalanche
magnetization of magnetite by RAO molecules. Moreover, we studied the prebiotic synthesis and magnetic properties of magnetite minerals in fresh water lakes, providing a plausible environmental setting for our scenario. Finally, we proposed a pathway through which the achieved homochirality in a single chiral compound, RAO, can efficiently propagate throughout the entire prebiotic network–from D-nucleic acids to L-peptides and then to homochiral metabolites. Our findings
provide a prebiotically plausible model for achieving systems-level homochirality from racemic starting materials and highlight the importance of magnetic interactions in addressing this age-old mystery.
Sukru Furkan Ozturk, Ph.D.
Sukru Furkan Ozturk received his undergraduate degree in Physics in 2018 from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, where he graduated as the valedictorian of his class with the highest cumulative GPA ever achieved in the department’s history. For his bachelor’s thesis, he worked on the theory of dipolar quantum droplets–quantum mechanical analogs of magnetic liquid droplets composed of magnetic atoms.
In 2018, Ozturk began his Ph.D. studies at Harvard University’s Department of Physics under the supervision of Prof. Markus Greiner. Initially, his research involved building an erbium quantum gas microscope, an analog quantum computer to study exotic quantum phases of matter. Within the Erbium Lab, he built an ultra-low noise optical lattice, an artificial crystal lattice made out of light, using a custom-built green laser to explore the physics of magnetic quantum gases under a high-resolution objective. This research led to a publication in Nature, marking the first observation of dipolar phases of matter in an optical lattice.
In 2021, Ozturk shifted his research focus towards the origins of life and joined the group of Prof. Dimitar Sasselov. There, his Ph.D. work centered on investigating the origins of biomolecular homochirality, specifically examining the role of magnetic surfaces as chiral agents due to the chiral-induced spin selectivity (CISS) effect. In his recent work, by utilizing magnetic surfaces as templates for the asymmetric crystallization of an RNA precursor, he demonstrated a robust method for achieving homochirality in RNA under prebiotic conditions. This technique, noted for its efficiency, led to a US patent for chiral separation, highlighting its practical use in pharmacology. In the same year, Ozturk published a paper in the Journal of Chemical Physics describing the propagation of chiral information from D-nucleic acids to L-peptides and then to omochiral metabolites, which was highlighted as the editor’s selection and featured on the issue’s cover.
Ozturk’s Ph.D. thesis research on homochirality has been recognized by origin-of-life chemist and Nobel laureate Jack Szostak as “a real breakthrough” and has been featured in prestigious science outlets such as Nature, Science, and Quanta Magazine. He received the Gertrude and Maurice Goldhaber Prize from the Harvard Physics Department, awarded annually to an outstanding graduate student in physics. Additionally, his work has been recognized with the Ataturk Science Award, the Innovation Prize, and first prize in the Ten Outstanding Young Persons of the World competition by JCI in the category of Scientific Development. Furthermore, his research on life’s homochirality inspired the popular science documentary “Cracking Chirality” by the Dreyfus Foundation:
(https://www.dreyfus.org/chemistry-shorts-releases-new-film-on-chirality/).
In addition, you are welcome to read the Quanta magazine article:
(https://www.quantamagazine.org/magnetism-may-have-given-life-its-molecular-asymmetry-20230906/).
Ozturk has been invited as a speaker to internationally renowned meetings, including being one of the 25 speakers at the Solvay Conference in 2024, which brings together leading scientists to discuss groundbreaking advancements in physics and chemistry. After completing his Ph.D. in 2024, Dr. Ozturk was awarded the Junior Research Fellowship by King’s College, Cambridge, and the Kavli-Laukien Prize Fellowship by the Origins of Life Initiative at Harvard University. Dr. Ozturk is currently an independent research fellow at Harvard University and King’s College, Cambridge, where he is investigating the origins of life and the physics of living systems.
Dr. Ozturk is also interested in science outreach and public engagement in science. He runs a YouTube channel with over 80,000 subscribers and 2.5 million total views, where he creates educational and scientific content primarily for the Turkish-speaking audience (https://www.youtube.com/@SFurkanOzturk61/videos).
Link:
[1] http://www.youtube.com/user/BilkentUniversitesi/live