Work

Prebiotic magnetite enables chirality-magnetic surface feedback

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: The emergence of biomolecular homochirality requires both an initial symmetry-breaking event and a mechanism to amplify and preserve a chiral imbalance. Magnetic minerals have been shown to function as chiral agents through the chiral-induced spin selectivity (CISS) effect and may have enabled homochirality on early Earth, yet the magnetic properties of magnetite formed under realistic prebiotic conditions remain unexplored. Here, we show that magnetite synthesized through two geochemically plausible pathways-UV-driven photo-oxidation and nitrite-mediated oxidation of Fe(II)-produces particles dominated by single-vortex and multivortex magnetic domain states. Magnetic measurements and electron microscopy confirm that these populations differ markedly from the nano-fabricated thin-film substrates conventionally used in previous CISS experiments. Using three-dimensional micromagnetic simulations, we demonstrate that single-domain and vortex-state grains undergo irreversible, exchange-driven remagnetization when interacting with spin-polarized homochiral compounds. This magnetic irreversibility provides a robust mechanism for storing and reinforcing weak chiral bias, suggesting that prebiotic magnetite could have contributed to the emergence and stabilization of persistent chiral bias on early Earth.

Source: Science Advances

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aeg3954