ChemistryCode 9701
Isomerism: optical
What this topic asks you to be able to do
- understand that enantiomers share the same physical and chemical properties, except in how they rotate plane polarised light and in the biological activity they may have
- understand what optically active means and what a racemic mixture is, and use both terms
- describe how plane polarised light is affected by a substance's two optical isomers
- account for why chirality matters when drug molecules are made synthetically, including: how the two enantiomers may differ biologically, why a racemic mixture must be split into two pure enantiomers, and employing chiral catalysts to yield one pure optical isomer