How to tell your left from your right

Scientists in China have developed a colour-changing tool to spot right-handed amino acids.

Most amino acids exist in two forms that are chemically identical but are mirror images of each other, like left and right hands. Left-handed amino acids play a key role in biological processes and are vital to life. It therefore makes sense to want to differentiate between left and right-handed versions.

To date, no single approach can discriminate between these mirror-image pairs, termed enantiomers, for all chiral amino acids. Put your hands together then for Baoxin Li and colleagues at Shaanxi Normal University, who have taken nanoparticle chiral recognition one step further and developed a colorimetric assay that detects right-handed enantiomers of chiral amino acids, and quantifies them too.

This article provides a link to coverage by Chemistry World.