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Telling left from right in the nucleus

Apr 1, 2001

Louis Pasteur first discovered that molecules have a "handedness" in 1848 while he was studying salts of acids that had been separated and dried from the bottom of old wine casks. Some 45 years later, Lord Kelvin introduced the term "chirality" to describe a geometric shape that looks different from its mirror image. Many biomolecules are also chiral - humans are made from proteins containing amino acids that are coded only for "right-handed" DNA.

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