A CLUE to the mystery of how nature selected left-handed amino acids rather right-handed ones may lie in the way the substances behave as they dissolve in water.
Amino acids can appear in left-handed (L) and right-handed (D) mirror-image forms. When made from scratch in the lab the two versions are equally likely to appear, but in nature, L amino acids dominate.
Donna Blackmond at Imperial College London and colleagues dissolved a mixture of solid L and D versions of the amino acid serine in water. They found that a small difference in the initial proportion of one version gets…
