How to Use chiral in a Sentence

chiral

adjective
Definition of chiralnext
  • Think of chiral molecules as being like a pair of gloves.
    — Nathaniel Scharping, Discover Magazine, 15 Dec. 2016
  • Think of chiral molecules as being like a pair of gloves.
    — Nathaniel Scharping, Discover Magazine, 14 Dec. 2016
  • But the cross-chiral ribozyme binds based on the molecule’s shape rather than its sequence.
    — Quanta Magazine, 25 Aug. 2016
  • Scientists now have an enzyme that doesn’t need a chiral world.
    — Quanta Magazine, 26 Nov. 2014
  • But instead of evaluating a chemical, the researchers plan to roast the microbes with beams of chiral electrons or muons.
    — Quanta Magazine, 29 June 2020
  • That occurs because the shape is chiral and cannot be transformed into its perfect mirror image.
    — Courtney Linder, Popular Mechanics, 30 Sep. 2019
  • The other route is the chiral vortical symmetry, which requires that the plasma be rotating.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 2 Aug. 2017
  • The game's plot revolves around the rebuilding of U.S. infrastructure through a system of information nodes called the chiral network.
    — Kahlief Adams, The Hollywood Reporter, 1 Nov. 2019
  • The drug also contained a chiral molecule that caused disastrous side effects in many babies.
    — Joanna Klein, New York Times, 14 June 2017
  • Typically, these are very small twisted metal wires that are also chiral.
    — Courtney Linder, Popular Mechanics, 30 Sep. 2019
  • And every molecule involved churns out chiral products.
    — Byrobert F. Service, science.org, 27 Oct. 2022
  • Or did chemical and physical forces conspire to create chiral molecules before life arose?
    — Quanta Magazine, 20 June 2016
  • Many pharmaceutical compounds are enantiomers (which is the word for mutually chiral pairs).
    — Rebecca Coffey, Forbes, 9 Dec. 2021
  • To make the calculation possible, chiral effective field theory employs a math trick sometimes used in high school calculus.
    — Quanta Magazine, 4 Dec. 2012
  • Today, pharmaceutical companies work harder to separate the active and inactive forms of molecules, and the Food and Drug Administration issued rules to crack down on many chiral drugs in the 1990s.
    — Joanna Klein, New York Times, 14 June 2017
  • At a cutoff of 1 GeV, for example, chiral effective field theory stops working, because protons and neutrons stop behaving like single particles and instead act like trios of quarks.
    — Quanta Magazine, 1 Mar. 2022
  • The classic example is chiral perturbation theory, which replaces the quarks and gluons of quantum chromodynamics with the pions and nucleons of the low-energy world.
    — Sean Carroll, Discover Magazine, 19 Apr. 2011
  • In a new discovery, reported last week in Science, researchers identified the first complex organic chiral molecule in interstellar space.
    — Quanta Magazine, 20 June 2016
  • Geniuses of the past reveled in mechanical manifestations of chiral geometry, which are oddly beautiful as well as being useful.
    — Frank Wilczek, WSJ, 5 July 2018
  • A primary inspiration was found in chemistry and chiral molecules, identically mirrored structures with different purposes.
    — Doug Bierend, WIRED, 12 Feb. 2014
  • For example, chiral molecular materials—molecules that exist as a pair of non-superimposable mirror images—will revolutionize quantum technologies.
    — Jessica Wade, WIRED, 27 Dec. 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'chiral.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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