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Related Concept Videos

Chirality in Nature02:30

Chirality in Nature

Chirality is the most intriguing yet essential facet of nature, governing life’s biochemical processes and precision. It can be observed from a snail shell pattern in a macroscopic world to an amino acid, the minutest building block of life. Most of the snails around the world have right-coiled shells because of the intrinsic chirality in their genes. All the amino acids present in the human body exist in an enantiomerically pure state, except for glycine - the sole achiral amino acid. The...
Chirality02:25

Chirality

Chirality is a term that describes the lack of mirror symmetry in an object. In other words, chiral objects cannot be superposed on their mirror images. For example, our feet are chiral, as the mirror image of the left foot, the right foot, cannot be superposed on the left foot.
Chiral objects exhibit a sense of handedness when they interact with another chiral object. For example, our left foot can only fit in the left shoe and not in the right shoe. Achiral objects — objects that have...
Chirality at Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Sulfur02:30

Chirality at Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Sulfur

Chirality is most prevalent in carbon-based tetrahedral compounds, but this important facet of molecular symmetry extends to sp3-hybridized nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur centers, including trivalent molecules with lone pairs. Here, the lone pair behaves as a functional group in addition to the other three substituents to form an analogous tetrahedral center that can be chiral.
A consequence of chirality is the need for enantiomeric resolution. While this is theoretically possible for all...
¹H NMR Chemical Shift Equivalence: Enantiotopic and Diastereotopic Protons00:58

¹H NMR Chemical Shift Equivalence: Enantiotopic and Diastereotopic Protons

Replacing each alpha-hydrogen in chloroethane by bromine (or a different functional group) yields a pair of enantiomers. Such protons are called prochiral or enantiotopic and are related by a mirror plane. Enantiotopic protons are chemically equivalent in an achiral environment. Because most proton NMR spectra are recorded using achiral solvents, enantiotopic hydrogens yield a single signal.
In chiral compounds such as 2-butanol, replacing the methylene hydrogens at C3 produces a pair of...
Prochirality02:05

Prochirality

The concept of prochirality leads to the nomenclature of the individual faces of a molecule and plays a crucial role in the enantioselective reaction. It is a concept where two or more achiral molecules react to produce chiral products. A typical process is the reaction of an achiral ketone to generate a chiral alcohol. Here, the achiral reactant reacts with an achiral reducing agent, sodium borohydride, to generate an equimolar mixture of the chiral enantiomers of the product. For example, an...
Molecules with Multiple Chiral Centers02:25

Molecules with Multiple Chiral Centers

Molecules that possess multiple chiral centers can afford a large number of stereoisomers. For instance, while some molecules like 2-butanol have one chiral center, defined as a tetrahedral carbon atom with four different substituents attached, several molecules like butane-2,3-diol have multiple chiral centers. A simple formula to predict the number of stereoisomers possible for a molecule with n chiral centers is 2n. However, there can be a lower number where some of the stereoisomers are...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 7, 2026

Spectral and Angle-Resolved Magneto-Optical Characterization of Photonic Nanostructures
08:01

Spectral and Angle-Resolved Magneto-Optical Characterization of Photonic Nanostructures

Published on: November 21, 2019

Chiral emission from chirotopic nanostructures.

Yawei Wu1,2, Zhenyu Wang1, Zihan Wu1

  • 1Department of Precision Machinery and Precision Instrumentation, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China.

Nature Communications
|June 5, 2026
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Researchers relaxed design constraints for chiral photonics by using local chirality in achiral materials, known as chirotopicity. This enables enhanced light emission from nanoparticles and dyes, validating a 50-year-old concept.

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Facet-to-facet Linking of Shape-anisotropic Colloidal Cadmium Chalcogenide Nanostructures

Published on: August 10, 2017

Area of Science:

  • Photonics
  • Materials Science
  • Physical Chemistry

Background:

  • Chiral photon emission typically requires mirror asymmetry in materials, limiting dichroic material design.
  • The concept of chirotopicity, or local chirality in achiral materials, was hypothesized but lacked experimental validation for optical effects.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To demonstrate that chirotopicity can relax symmetry restrictions in chiral photonics.
  • To show that photonic nanostructures can enhance and localize chirotopic fields.
  • To investigate the emission of light from achiral luminophores within these fields.

Main Methods:

  • Utilizing photonic nanostructures to create and control local chirotopic fields.
  • Engulfing achiral luminophores within these engineered chirotopic fields.
  • Measuring luminescence dissymmetry factors of the emitted light.

Main Results:

  • Achiral materials, when structured, can exhibit local chirality (chirotopicity).
  • Photonic nanostructures localized and enhanced left- and right-handed chirotopic fields.
  • Achiral luminophores emitted intense, highly elliptic light with dissymmetry factors up to 1.65 and -1.58.

Conclusions:

  • The study validates the concept of chirotopicity for optical applications.
  • Chirotopicity enables the design of novel chiral photonic devices without traditional symmetry constraints.
  • This approach offers a new pathway for controlling light-matter interactions in chiral photonics.