A Departmental Polarimeter

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Chiral molecules are everywhere in Nature. Examples include amino acids, carbohydrates, bioactive natural products and pharmaceutical active ingredients that can exist as a mixture of two superimposable mirror images. However, Nature typically shows preference for the formation of only one of the two mirror images (enantiomers), and this preference results in a clear incentive to synthetize pharmaceuticals as single enantiomers. The only physical property that is different for two enantiomers is their ability to interact with circularly polarized light, which leads to optical rotation being a required measurement for any research endeavor involving enantioenriched molecules. The instrument required to acquire optical rotations is a polarimeter, and it is present in the vast majority of Chemistry Departments around the world.