In nature, molecules often show a strong preference for partnering with other molecules that share the same chirality or handedness. A behavior that is quite evident in the phenomenon known as homochirality-driven entanglement, where molecules that are all left-handed or all right-handed preferentially recognize and wrap around one another, forming complex and interlocked structures.
We have known about this natural behavior for quite some time, but its potential in a laboratory setting remained largely untapped—until now. By putting this principle to work, researchers cracked a new technique that tackles a long-standing challenge in molecular synthesis.
A team from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, and the University of Bristol, UK, leveraged stereochemical information inherent in amino acids to guide the synthesis of a library of chiral Solomon links —a class of complex, mechanically interlocked molecules (MIMs) with doubly interlocked structures.









