#chirality

[mindblowingscience]

An entirely new structure of light is helping to measure chirality in molecules more accurately and robustly than ever before, in a major potential step for the pharmaceutical industry. Published in Nature Photonics, a team from King's College London and the Max Born Institute have created an entirely new structure of light that traces out a chiral curve over time. This chiral curve has different shapes at different points in space, forming a vortex structure. By interacting with chiral particles it moves through over time, the new "chiral vortex" provides an accurate and robust form of measurement.

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[materialsscienceandengineering]

Terahertz pulses induce chirality in a non-chiral crystal

Chirality refers to objects that cannot be superimposed onto their mirror images through any combination of rotations or translations, much like the distinct left and right hands of a human. In chiral crystals, the spatial arrangement of atoms confers a specific "handedness," which—for example—influences their optical and electrical properties. A Hamburg-Oxford team has focused on so-called antiferro-chirals, a type of non-chiral crystal reminiscent of antiferro-magnetic materials, in which magnetic moments anti-align in a staggered pattern leading to a vanishing net magnetization. An antiferro-chiral crystal is composed of equivalent amounts of left- and right-handed substructures in a unit cell, rendering it overall non-chiral. The research team, led by Andrea Cavalleri of the Max-Planck-Institut for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, used terahertz light to lift this balance in the non-chiral material boron phosphate (BPO4), in this way inducing finite chirality on an ultrafast time scale.

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[adeptofarmok]

[er-cryptid]

Chiral or Achiral [Ex. 2]

Patreon

[bpod-bpod]

Driving the Tube

Applying advanced microfluidics technology, reveals the role of cells' 'handedness' – a bias for direction of growth – in vessel development

Read the published research article here

Image from work by Haokang Zhang and colleagues

Department of Biomedical Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Science Advances, February 2024

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[fashionfotorecccluse]

Right handed

[tenth-sentence]

Because (c) and its mirror image (d) are superimposable, they are the same molecule and achiral.

"Chemistry" 2e - Blackman, A., Bottle, S., Schmid, S., Mocerino, M., Wille, U.

[nerdymemes]

[homeostasister]

Gonna start using enantiomer terminology to talk about everyday chiral objects.

Ugh, all our bread knives are R configuration. I wish we had a racemic mixture so I could pick a knife with the right chirality to actually use the serrated edge without having to cut towards myself.

[gorgonstaringcontest]

Incidentally, this involves one of my favourite words - chiral.

Chirality refers to "handed-ness", or an image that can't be superimposed over its mirror image by any arrangement.

One wierd thing is that chemical compounds have chirality - compounds can be left and right handed! DNA has chirality.

In fact, it forms the basis of a lot of our natural world. Scientists studying microbiota even worry about accidentally creating organisms with opposite chirality, because it would have devastating effects on Life on Earth™️. Like, our immune system wouldn't recognise a harmful bacteria with left-handed chirality because so far all bacteria has right-handed chirality. It would basically be invisible.

It (the word, not the world-ending bacteria thing) also has a cool usage in Death Stranding by Hideo Kojima - Chiralium, a compound left behind on earth by the Death Stranding that you collect throughout the game.

Me: *looking at a porcelain hand in the home decor aisle of a store* if I lost my hands in some kind of tragic accident, I’d decorate my entire home with hand-shaped things. Then I’d invite guests over for like, dinner parties and such and sit there expectantly just basking in their discomfort.

My boyfriend: Do you hear what you say when you talk? Do you know what you just said to me?

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Scientists uncover light absorbing properties of achiral materials

Researchers at the University of Ottawa have made a discovery that changes what we know about light and materials. They found that engineered achiral (symmetric) materials, called achiral plasmonic metasurfaces, can absorb light differently depending on the handedness of the wavefront of light. This was surprising because, for years, such materials were found to be indifferent to any optical probes and do not show such selective absorption. The research, conducted over the past year at uOttawa's Advanced Research Complex (ARC), was led by Ravi Bhardwaj, Professor, Department of Physics at the University of Ottawa and Ph.D. student Ashish Jain. Collaborators include Howard Northfield, Research Engineer, and colleagues Ebrahim Karimi, Canada Research Chair in Structured Light and Associate Professor of Physics, and Pierre Berini, University Research Chair in Surface Plasmon Photonics and Professor of Electrical Engineering.

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[johniac]

SciTech Chronicles. . . . . . . . .Feb 27, 2025

[er-cryptid]

Meso Compound [Ex. 1]

Patreon

[humormehorny]

No no no that a the sith I hate the cis because everything becomes chiral all the way down

you just hate the cis because of the things that they did

I hate the cis because it is led by the treacherous count dooku

[bpod-bpod]

Lines of Asymmetry

From a distance we look roughly symmetrical, but we’re not completely – our faces might look odd if they were. Many of our organs must develop asymmetrically to take on their correct shape or move into place. But where does this asymmetry come from? These human cells are growing on circular stages under a high-powered microscope. Tiny 'bones' of actin (highlighted in green) in their cytoskeletons develop chirality – that is, they twist in a particular direction. Researchers find a group of proteins which sway these actin patterns. When they block the activity of profilin 1, for example, the direction of the actin swirl changes from anticlockwise (top left) to clockwise (top right). This switch is reversible (bottom left) and doesn't happen when blocking a similar protein, profilin 2 (bottom right). With these roots of asymmetry discovered, researchers may now trace lines of asymmetry throughout our development.

Written by John Ankers

Image adapted from work by Yee Han Tee and colleagues

Mechanobiology Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Nature Communications, February 2023

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[thelovebudllc]

Chirality Nail Polish - Polish Pick Up May 2021

Hiya guys! It has been such a chaotic week, I feel like a cartoon character with the dizzy eyes. And for the first time in a long time it has just been day-job related. It’s a lot of feeling like I’m being treated unfairly and under paid for the amount of work I am having to do. I won’t get too much more into it than that, but it has been bumming me out quite badly to the point of crying. It…