Why Is Your Heart on the Left? Unraveling the Mysteries of Biological Chirality

Exploring geometry and chirality in life by probing the sphinx tile.
Why is the heart slightly to the left side of the body for most people? Why is DNA almost always a right-handed helix? The same goes for alpha helices, the building blocks of proteins. Chirality, or handedness, is pervasive in biology, yet the reasons behind it often remain mysterious.

Greg Huber, a biophysicist and researcher at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub San Francisco, spent three years exploring these questions and more using a simple asymmetric shape that lives on the triangular lattice, and that has received little academic attention – the sphinx tile. He and his collaborators – Craig Knecht, Walter Trump, and Robert Ziff – found unexpected properties related to its chirality. Their study was published recently in the journal Physical Review Research.