Why does life favour one molecule over its mirror image?
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A long-standing mystery about what determined the “handedness” of molecules inside living cells may finally have a solution, thanks to a happy accident in the lab.
“We were really surprised when we got this selection that exactly matches up to what life uses,” says Thomas Richards at the University of Oxford.
Just as our left and right hands are mirror images of each other that can’t be superimposed, many molecules also have left or right-handed…
