How Can the Enantiomers of a Chiral Molecule be Separated More Effectively?

Chiral molecules are molecules that behave as image and mirror image to each other; these are also called enantiomers. There is a demand in pure enantiomers, which can be created for the use of a variety of industries, such as drugs for the pharmaceutical industry or herbicides for agrochemistry. ANDREAS SEIDEL-MORGENSTERN and his research team investigate access to these pure enantiomers. To achieve this, they work on separating the two enantiomers, complementing alternative approaches devoted to synthesize just one of them. For this, they use racemic mixtures – which contain equal amounts of left- and right-handed enantiomers of a chiral molecule – and then split these racemates. The separation process they managed to develop for this, as is described in this video, allows them to produce larger quantities of pure enantiomers from cheap available mixtures than was possible before. This means that these can now also be produced more effectively in industrial contexts