Homochirality

Homochirality describes a property of some molecules made up of chiral units. A molecule is said to be homochiral if all the molecule's constituent units are of the same chiral form. In biology homochirality is a common property of amino acids and sugars. The origin of this phenomenon is not clearly understood. It is unclear if homochirality has a purpose, however it appears to be a form of information storage. One suggestion is that it reduces entropy barriers in the formation of large organized molecules. It has been experimentally verified that amino acids form large aggregates in larger abundance from enantiopure substrates than from racemic ones.