MPI's Benjamin List on Organic Asymmetric Catalysis

摘要

Both humans and chemical compounds can be divided into the left- and right-handed versions, but for humans, the benefits of one over the other are mostly limited to a few positions in baseball. For chiral molecules, as they're known, which come in mirror-image versions like right and left hands-sugars, for instance, or amino acids or drugs-the functional difference between a compound and its mirror-image can be night and day. In pharmaceuticals, one might cure your headache while the other might be toxic, so the synthesis of compounds that come only in one form or the other-either all right-handed or all left-is fundamental to the industry.