Emergence of a Single Solid Chiral State from a Nearly Racemic Amino Acid Derivative

摘要

Understanding how the single-handedness of biological molecules came about has been of intense interest since Pasteur first separated mirror-image crystals of a tartrate salt. Several models have been proposed to address the question of how enantiomerically pure solutions or crystalline phases could have emerged from a presumably racemic prebiotic world. Viedma recently demonstrated the inexorable and random emergence of solid-phase single chirality for the intrinsically achiral inorganic compound NaClO_3 initially present as a racemic mixture of two enantiomorphic solid phases in equilibrium with the achiral aqueous phase (Scheme la).