  Life is homochiral and homochirality is a fundamental feature of living
systems on Earth. While the exact mechanism that led to homochirality is still
not fully understood, any realistic scenario on the origins of life needs to
address the emergence of homochirality. In order to impose and maintain
chirality in a prebiotic network, an environmental factor functioning as a
chiral agent is demanded. Magnetized surfaces are prebiotically plausible
chiral agents, shown to be effective in enantioseparation of
ribose-aminooxazoline (RAO), a ribonucleic acid (RNA) precursor, due to the
chiral-induced spin selectivity (CISS) effect. As such, mechanisms for breaking
the magnetic symmetry of magnetic minerals are of the utmost importance. Here
we report the avalanche magnetization of magnetite $(Fe_{3}O_{4})$ by the
crystallization of enantiopure RAO. The observed breaking of the magnetic
symmetry is induced by the chiral molecules due to the CISS effect and spreads
out across the magnetic surface like an avalanche, providing a way to uniformly
magnetize a magnetic surface without fully covering it. Considered together
with our previous results on enantioseparation by crystallization on a magnetic
surface, chirality-induced avalanche magnetization paves the way for a
cooperative feedback between chiral molecules and magnetic surfaces. With this
feedback, a weak natural bias in the net magnetization can be amplified and
spin-selective processes can be accommodated on magnetic minerals on a
persistent basis.
