Chirality Makes or Breaks Chemically Driven Self-Assembly.

ABSTRACT: Nature has consistently selected homochiral building blocks from millions of possible diastereomers across diverse biomolecular structures to drive molecular recognition, catalysis and self-assembly. Despite its central role in biology, chirality's influence on chemically driven reaction networks remains unexplored. Here, we demonstrate that chiral aminoacyl phosphate esters, synthetic analogs of biological acylating intermediates, drive self-assembly and reaction pathways, that are modulated purely by their configuration, without the need for changes in functional groups. Using enantiopure aminoacyl phosphate esters, we show that these left- and right-handed acylating agents generate transient epimeric (thio)-esters from homochiral peptide substrates, leading to supramolecular architectur

SUBMITTER: Saile L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12435440 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature