Let us imagine that one can pass through the mirror, as Alice did in Lewis Carroll’s novel “Through the Looking-Glass”, and see how the world we know would look like on the other side of the mirror. Surprisingly, biscuits would still be sweet, although not fattening. The toxicity of a “red tide”, i.e. algal bloom, would be greatly reduced since the mirror counterpart of naturally occurring algal toxin does not fit human receptors. Caraway would smell like mint, and mint would smell like caraway, which is a consequence of one of the mirror forms of carvone being responsible for caraway’s odor while the other is responsible for mint’s odor. In order to study such intriguing phenomena caused by the molecules that differ from their mirror images (enantiomers), i.e. chiral molecules, appropriate research tools are necessary, the establishment of which is the goal of the project. In order to achieve this challenging goal, the project aims to combine the strengths of studies of interactions of matter with the electromagnetic field and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. The advantage of using light-matter interactions in the optical domain is that it provides direct information on which enantiomers are present in the sample. The main benefit of applying magnetic resonance is the determination of the molecular structure with atomic resolution, which is even possible in the case of studies of complex mixtures and provides the spatial distribution of the molecules. However, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy is blind to molecular chirality. Lifting such an obstacle opens a very attractive way to study chirality from an entirely different angle, which is especially important in understanding differences in the bioactivity of chiral molecules, e.g. pharmacologically active substances, since underestimation of such differences has severe sociomedical consequences, such as the thalidomide scandal.
