THE mystery of why nature favours the left-handed – at least when it comes to amino acids – may have a simple answer. It could all be down to an obscure property of water.
When amino acids are made in the lab, they come in mirror-image pairs. Though both forms behave identically in most chemical reactions, biological processes use only the left-handed (L) variety.
In an attempt to explain this puzzling bias, Uwe Meierhenrich at the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis in France suggested last year that circularly polarised radiation may have preferentially destroyed right-handed (D) amino acids arriving from space, leaving behind…
