The Foundations of Biochemistry: Questionnaire Essay Example

light, and Louis Pasteur discovered that mirror-image crystals of tartaric acid (racemic acid) rotate polarized light in opposite directions. One sample rotates it to the left while the other rotates it to the right.Information regarding the synthesis and testing of stereoisomers can be found in Chemical foundations on pages 18-19, with a difficulty level of 3. In pharmaceutical labs, it is important to separate each moiety of a drug's racemic mixture and test its biological activity because different stereoisomers may have vastly different effects on an organism - one moiety could be beneficial while the other may be toxic or ineffective in decreasing the efficacy of the other. Anus explains that living organisms produce specific chiral forms of biomolecules while laboratory chemical synthesis generally produces racemic mixtures using chiral reagents. Enzymes are inherently chiral catalysts due to being made from chiral precursors, resulting in strong stereoselectivity in reactants and mechanisms producing chiral products. This information is also explained in Chemical foundations. Additionally, Physical foundations (with a difficulty level of 2) reveals that proteins are consistently synthesized by living cells without overproduction leading to cell destruction through natural turnover and degradation processes, maintaining dynamic steady state under appropriate conditions. This process applies similarly to Anus.