Chemistry and molecular handedness

The chemistry prize chapter explains chirality, the property that lets a molecule and its mirror image share identical atoms and bonds but have opposite three-dimensional arrangements, as seen in the enantiomers L-alanine and D-alanine. The prize-winning work showed chemical mechanisms by which a small initial imbalance between mirror-image forms can be amplified into a much larger one, a process relevant to how life ended up using only one handedness, left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars, despite no obvious chemical reason to prefer either in an unbiased environment.