The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to French scientist Henri B. Kagan and Japan’s Kenso Soai for providing a solution to the chemical mystery of life’s asymmetry according to BBC.
The researchers discovered how nature exclusively makes the correct version of a molecule – rather than its mirror image.
For example, amino acid molecules, the building blocks of proteins, exist as two forms that are each other’s mirror image.
But living organisms on Earth only function with one of those forms. The Nobel laureates answered the question: Why does life favour just one of these mirror image molecules over the other.
In organic chemistry, this property is known as “chirality”, so chiral molecules have both right and left-handed forms.
You can think of them as looking like our hands – not identical, but each a mirror image of the other.
And while nature almost exclusively produces the version it requires to function, chemical reactions in a lab usually create a 50/50 mix of both left- and right-handed molecules.
When it comes to making drugs, this is particularly significant, because each version behaves differently when it interacts with our bodies.
So, one might have disease-fighting properties, while the other version does nothing or even causes harm.
By solving the mystery of chirality, Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai worked out how to design chemical reactions to produce much more of the desired version of a molecule.
Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry explained: “Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have provided a solution to a chemical mystery that is over a century old: how homochirality – the selective production of the correct version of a molecule – can emerge spontaneously.
“The chemical reactions they have developed are spectacular.”