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Updated: May 15, 2026

Coulomb Explosion Imaging as a Tool to Distinguish Between Stereoisomers
Published on: August 18, 2017
Chemical and physical models for the emergence of biological homochirality
Jason E Hein1, Dragos Gherase, Donna G Blackmond
1Chemistry and Chemical Biology University of California Merced, Merced, CA, 95343, USA, jhein2@ucmerced.edu.
Abstract:
The past several decades have witnessed the development of a number of different experimental approaches to help understand how the homochirality of biological molecules might have evolved in a prebiotic world. This chapter reviews chemical and physical models with a special focus on recent developments in attrition-enhanced deracemization of conglomerates, a process that combines solution phase chemical interconversion of enantiomers with thermodynamic and kinetic considerations of solubility, crystal growth, and dissolution.
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