Abstract

It is well known that living nature is characterized by exceptional “chiral purity": All living organisms are composed of only one of two possible left-right mirror molecular isomers, all biomolecules being right- or left-handed spirals (i.e., being essentially chiral). The origin of this intriguing phenomenon has not been understood so far. The main idea of the presented research is to apply new already developed nonlinear optical methods to provide needed instrumentation for extracting important stereochemical information on the biological molecules in their natural environment, i.e., in liquid solutions and, in particular, in water solutions¹ Up to now, a limited amount of this information (still very important) has been obtained from the spectroscopy of natural optical activity, and, more specifically, from the spectroscopies of circular dichroism (CD) and/or optical rotation (OR), both techniques being described by linear optical susceptibilities of chiral biomolecules.

© 1994 IEEE