ABSTRACT
Summary and future directions In the Introduction of this book, questions are posed as to the correlation between the omnipresence of chirality in naturally occurring molecules and their functionality. Enzymes are molecular machines having stringent chiral discrimination within their active sites. Analysis of the molecular organization of the active site structure and of the related interactions is useful to understand the chiral speci†city of enzymatic reactions. Crystallographic analysis provides clear insight into the microscopic organization of the enzymatic structures. Electronic structure-based computations and molecular dynamics studies provide complementary views about enzymatic reactions. The wealth of information now forms a platform for analysis of the origin of the chiral preference exhibited by various enzymes. Active sites are nano…asks where such reactions are occurring, and it is instructive to look into their molecular processes so that one can learn about the generic mechanisms used by these natural devices to utilize the cognate substrate and reject the others in a fast and accurate way. Although different enzymes, and even enzymes in a given class, can catalyze reactions of a bewildering variety, studies so far have been greatly promising in understanding the role of chirality in biological reactions and in following the fundamental correlation between chirality and life. Notably, the mechanism of discrimination of one substrate from the other is key to the ability of the enzymes to act as ef†cient biocatalysts, which is hard to match by synthetic design and which provides impetus for the study of enzymatic biocatalysis.
