Inorganic and hybrid molecules and materials

就像人的手是彼此的镜像一样，许多分子也是“手性的”或手性的。手性分子很重要，因为它们是许多生物学（例如DNA，蛋白质和糖）的基石，许多相互作用，例如药物与其体内特定靶标之间的相互作用，依赖于手性成分之间的识别事件：手性分子只有一只“手”被识别，而另一只则被拒绝。我们的研究采用了一种综合的方法来开发新的催化剂，用于选择性地生产手性分子的单“手”。

Just as a person's hands are mirror images of one another, many molecules are also "handed," or chiral. Chiral molecules are important because they are the building blocks of much of biology (e.g., DNA, proteins and sugars) and many interactions, such as those between drugs and their specific targets in the body, depend upon discriminating recognition events between chiral components: only one "hand" of a chiral molecule is recognised, while the other is rejected. Our research takes an integrated approach to the development of fundamentally new catalysts for the selective production of single "hands" of chiral molecules.