FLUORINE NMR TELLS MIRROR-IMAGE MOLECULES APART

摘要

Enantiomers-mirror-image molecules-are the same in many ways, yet biology and chemistry tend to focus on the differences. For example, enzymes typically recognize one enantiomer and not the other, which may determine whether a drug that targets an enzyme actually works. Differentiating between enantiomers is critical for synthetic, medicinal, and biological chemistry; unfortunately, existing methods for doing so are slow or technically demanding. Using fluorine-19 NMR spectroscopy, Yanchuan Zhao and Timothy Swager have developed a simple and rapid approach to detect enantiomers in a sample using a chiral-sensing molecule (DOI: 10.1021/jacs.5b00556).