Real-time Monitoring of Chiral Centre Formation.

Researchers have developed a method to monitor the formation of individual chiral centres in real time at the single-molecule level using graphene-based molecular junctions. The chirality-induced spin-selectivity effect (Ciss) was used to detect the chirality of the reaction product and intermediates in situ. The technique could lead to the discovery of previously unknown reaction mechanisms of enantiospecific reactions and could help the pharmaceutical industry manufacture drugs more efficiently.