Exploring a world with chiral biochemistry: chirality detection

Space explorers have landed on an Earth like planet and, to their surprise, the place is luscious and covered in life, to the point of resembling some earthly tropical atoll.

What they don't know yet is that the entire biochemistry of the planet they are exploring has opposite chirality with respect to theirs.

Once you have a polarimeter, measuring the chirality of certain molecules is a rather easy task.

Is there any way for them to detect or at least suspect that something is odd with the local chirality, before they measure samples with a polarimeter?

To be clear, I prefer something empirical. For example to observe if a substance is fatty, one can simply spread it on a surface and observe how water interacts with it, without needing any more complex instrument.

Among the exploring crew there is a biologist and a chemist.

posted almost 4 years ago

L.Dutch - Reinstate Monica‭

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