ChemInform Abstract: The Development of Concepts of Chiral Discrimination

Abstract

Pasteur's conjecture (1860) that biomolecular homochirality arose from a chiral natural force as yet inaccessible in the laboratory was supplanted by Fischer's (1894) “key and lock” hypothesis of stereoselection in enantiomer to diastereomer conversions, whether in the laboratory or in living organisms. Elaborations of the “key and lock” hypothesis by Haldane (1930) and Pauling (1948) have been illustrated and supported with modification by X-ray diffraction crystal structures of enzyme–substrate complexes over the past quarter century. Two types of mechanism for the product diastereoselectivity in the reactions of an enantiomer with an achiral reagent, early proposed, have recent support: one proposes a quasidiastereomeric structure for the enantiomer attacked in the ground state, the other for the corresponding transition state of the reaction. Approaches to the differential biological activity of two enantiomers postulate either the complete binding of each isomer to a chiral receptor site, resulting in diastereomeric complexes with inequivalent bioactivities, or the differential binding of the two isomers to a set of three sites, with which only one isomer is sterically congruent. Biochemical homochirality, based on the chiral stereoselectivity of both biosynthetic and metabolic reactions, derives from the evolutionary pressure for a progressive enhancement of the kinetic efficiency and economy of those reactions. Recently Pasteur has been vindicated in part, and the problem of the original prebiotic enantiomeric excess left outstanding by Fischer has been solved. The unification of the electromagnetic with the weak interaction provided a universal chiral natural force, the electroweak interaction, which favours the chiral series selected during the course of biochemical evolution, both the D-sugars and the L-amino acids.