Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
A catalytic process driven by visible light converts a mixture of mirror-image isomers of compounds called allenes to a single mirror-image isomer — opening up avenues of research for synthetic chemistry.
Cheng Yang is in the Key Laboratory of Green Chemistry & Technology of Ministry of Education, College of Chemistry, State Key Laboratory of Biotherapy, and Healthy Food Evaluation Research Center, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610064, China.
Molecules can exhibit a handedness, known as chirality. This is crucial to many aspects of chemistry and biology because the mirror-image isomers (enantiomers) of a chiral molecule can have distinctly different properties, reactivities and chemical or biological functions. For example, nature often uses just one enantiomer of a family of molecules as building blocks to construct sophisticated structures such as DNA, and in other biological processes. The development of methods for synthesizing chiral molecules asymmetrically — predominantly as a single enantiomer — is therefore one of the most important goals in organic and medicinal chemistry. In a paper in Nature, Hölzl-Hobmeier et al.1 report an approach that can also be used to achieve a seemingly impossible task in asymmetric synthesis: the light-induced, catalytic and apparently irreversible formation of single enantiomers of molecules called allenes from a one-to-one mixture of enantiomers (a racemic mixture).