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From Cosmic Chirality to Protein Structure : Lord Kelvin's Legacy
Author(s) -
Barron Laurence D.
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
chirality
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.43
H-Index - 77
eISSN - 1520-636X
pISSN - 0899-0042
DOI - 10.1002/chir.22017
Subject(s) - chirality (physics) , raman optical activity , chemistry , raman spectroscopy , chemical physics , degenerate energy levels , molecular physics , molecule , symmetry breaking , physics , quantum mechanics , spontaneous symmetry breaking , explicit symmetry breaking , organic chemistry
A selection of my work on chirality is sketched in two distinct parts of this lecture. Symmetry and Chirality explains how the discrete symmetries of parity P , time reversal T , and charge conjugation C may be used to characterize the properties of chiral systems. The concepts of true chirality (time‐invariant enantiomorphism) and false chirality (time‐noninvariant enantiomorphism) that emerge provide an extension of Lord Kelvin's original definition of chirality to situations where motion is an essential ingredient thereby clarifying, inter alia, the nature of physical influences able to induce absolute enantioselection. Consideration of symmetry violations reveals that strict enantiomers (exactly degenerate) are interconverted by the combined CP operation. Raman optical activity surveys work, from first observation to current applications, on a new chiroptical spectroscopy that measures vibrational optical activity via Raman scattering of circularly polarized light. Raman optical activity provides incisive information ranging from absolute configuration and complete solution structure of smaller chiral molecules and oligomers to protein and nucleic acid structure of intact viruses. Chirality 24:879–893, 2012 . © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.