To confirm Bennu’s amino acids were not contaminated by Earth, scientists analyzed their chirality (handedness). Life on Earth exclusively uses left-handed amino acids, while non-biological processes ...

More than half of all modern medicines are chiral. Since biomolecules such as amino acids, sugars and proteins in our body all have the same handedness, active pharmaceutical ingredients must also ...

For example, Dieter Enders and Wolfgang Bettray nicely detail the applications of Enders' chiral auxiliary (S)-1-amino-2-methoxymethylpyrrolidine (SAMP) to the chemical syntheses of several chiral ...

Many biopolymers such as DNA form helices, which are inherently chiral structures, while compounds such as amino acids form complex 3D shapes that also can have left and right forms. Researchers now ...

The discovery challenges the long-held belief that life’s building blocks—specifically, amino acids and sugars—were strictly ...

In their study, thin-film devices of the chiral superconductor κ-NCS were fabricated to probe the presence of nonreciprocal transport. Remarkably, they observed a giant nonreciprocal signal whose ...

Research suggests that calcium may have played a key role in guiding the development of a specific molecular handedness in ...

In the past several decades, significant progress has been made in controlling molecular chirality, as evidenced by the several Nobel Prizes in chemistry awarded in this area, particularly for ...

Amino acids are organic compounds that contain amino (-NH3+) functional groups, along with a side chain (R group) specific to each amino acid. The elements present in every amino acid are carbon (C), ...