How to identify chiral centers
Chiral purity of pharmaceutical, natural, and other consumer products is important for their effectiveness and safety. This is because the enantiomers may have different physiological activity, as their metabolic pathways within chiral biological systems may differ dramatically. As such, monitoring and controlling the chirality or enantiopurity during all stages of product manufacturing is a highly important task. However, most enantioselective techniques are not readily applicable for online monitoring as they are either too slow or laborious for routine online monitoring. In addition, many methods require enantiopure standards that can be expensive or not available. Therefore, analytical techniques capable of rapid enantiopurity measurements directly on crude process mixtures without standards are of high interest.
