Life’s chemistry goes through the looking glass
Chemists were taught that natural systems only use L-amino acids. Andy Extance finds out just how wrong that is proving
Two amino acids face each other. They are mirror images, isomers that chemists know as enantiomers. Yet, in an unfair twist of science, one dominates the other almost entirely. In chemistry lessons, we learn that L-amino acid enantiomers rule the biological world, making up vital structures in every living thing. So are their D-amino acid mirror images absent from the biological world? Definitely not! Instead, scientists are learning that these downtrodden enantiomers are more important than they had previously realised.