Experiment: Study Chiralitt with Homemade Polarimeter

[deleted-306095]

So I want to do the chirality project : Study Chirality with Homemade Polarimeter. I showed my progress report to my teacher, but he asked me the questions: What are you testing? Why did you choose this project and how can your project help us in our everyday life (I was thinking more medically, like with blood sugar or something like that). Anybody can help me answer these questions?

[deleted-306095]

So I want to do the chirality project : Study Chirality with Homemade Polarimeter. I showed my progress report to my teacher, but he asked me the questions: What are you testing? Why did you choose this project and how can your project help us in our everyday life (I was thinking more medically, like with blood sugar or something like that). Anybody can help me answer these questions?

[SciB]

This is an interesting and potentially useful project. I like it because it combines instrumentation chemistry and biology. However, as you said, what sort of hypothesis can you ask using chirality as the basis. You mentioned blood glucose but as far as I know only the D-form of glucose is present in all higher animals. If L-glucose were formed it would indeed be unusual since most enzymes that use glucose can only handle D-glucose.

There may be other sugars in the body that exist in different chiral forms and certainly there are other molecules that are chiral but I don't know how you would use the polarimeter to find them. You probably would have to use purified forms in a cell culture model.

Do some more reading about chirality in medicine and metabolism and see if you can come up with a hypothesis. Then we can help you develop a workable model to experiment with. Do you have access to a research lab to work in? That is almost essential for a project like this.

Good luck!

Sybee