Enantiomer

In chemistry, enantiomers are a pair of compounds which are mirror images of each other, but non superimposable (cannot be translated onto each other).

Enantiomers are a subgroup of stereoisomers, which are compounds with the exact same chemical formula and molecular bonding order, yet are spatially different. These molecules can exhibit very different properties and uses, and as such, are often a concern for drug manufacturing, especially when steps are preformed which may lead to mixtures of different stereoisomers, such as SN1 reactions (unimolecular nucleophillic substitution reactions).

Enantioselectivity

The concept of enantioselectivity is extremely important within modern drug synthesis, as compounds with extremely similar structural formulae, can often have very different properties. Certain medicines, for example, when synthesised, result in a 50/50 mix of enantiomers (also called a racemic mixture), where half of the compound may be a working medicine, and the other half may be ineffective or lethal in some cases. As such, modern industrial pharmaceutics often involves large amounts of research on methods of enantiomer selective manufacturing processes. Mixtures of enantiomers are extremely impractical to seperate otherwise, and thus, the manufacuring of enantiopure mixtures is extremely beneficial within drug production, and is particularly of interest within biotechnology, where the use of modified enzymes can make the process of enantiomer selectivity much more practical.