I mentioned in my last post an unjustly neglected paper from that golden age of 1951-1953 by Kirkwood and co. They had shown that Fischer’s famous guess for the absolute configurations of organic chiral molecules was correct. The two molecules used to infer this are shown below.
Posts Tagged ‘optical rotation’
A golden age for (computational) spectroscopy.
Monday, April 2nd, 2012A comparison of left and right handed DNA double-helix models.
Saturday, January 1st, 2011When Watson and Crick (WC) constructed their famous 3D model for DNA, they had to decide whether to make the double helix left or right handed. They chose a right-handed turn, on the grounds that their attempts at left-handed models all “violated permissible van der Waals contacts“. No details of what these might have been were given in their original full article (or the particular base-pairs which led to the observation). This follow-up to my earlier post explores this aspect, using a computer model.