Chiral molecules are nothing new. However, chiral molecules with their sole stereogenic centre on an oxygen atom are something completely different. British researchers are the first in the world to accomplish this.

Chirality, or ‘handedness’, is a fundamental concept in chemistry. The vast majority of the molecules in your body, for example, are chiral, meaning that they rotate polarised light either to the left or to the right, depending on their spatial structure. Usually the chiral centre is a carbon atom with four different substituents, but in some cases it’s trivalent phosphorus, sulphur or nitrogen. In these latter atoms, chirality can be switched by pyramidal inversion, just as the wind sometimes ‘inverts’ an unfortunate umbrella. But researchers at the University of Oxford were able to synthesise a room-temperature stable molecule with its only stereogenic centre on an oxygen atom – a world first – which they published in Nature.