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welcome to the summer school on 
Chiral Crystallization, Resolution & Deracemization

Organized on behalf of ITN CORE, EFCE Working Party on Crystallisation and COST Action CM 1402

The goal of this summer school was to outline the basics of chirality and chiral purification in the context of crystallisation. In 1848 Louis Pasteur discovered that biological molecules can be chiral, i.e., occur in both a left-handed and a right-handed form. Such molecules are each other’s (non-superimposable) mirror image, but identical otherwise. In a normal chemical synthesis the two enantiomers will be produced in equal amounts. Life on earth, however, is found to be predominantly homochiral, with only one type of handedness present of a specific biomolecule. On the one hand this raises the fundamental question how this single-handedness occurred. On the other hand this has practical consequences since the human body can respond very differently to the two enantiomers and thus for pharmaceutical applications it is often necessary to produce a chirally pure product.

This summer school taught the participants the current state of the art in different routes to produce chirally pure material. The focus was on methods involving crystallisation, and thus the school started with the fundamentals of crystal growth and the crystallography of chiral compounds. Subsequently the most important chiral purification methods were presented.

We encouraged active participation of the students by (1) having a discussion/exercise session after each lecture series and (2) organizing a poster session in which each participant had the opportunity to discuss his/her current research with the other participants.