How to Use chiral in a Sentence

chiral

adjective
  • The amino acids and sugars that make up our bodies are chiral.
    — Nathaniel Scharping, Discover Magazine, 14 Dec. 2016
  • Scientists now have an enzyme that doesn’t need a chiral world.
    — Quanta Magazine, 26 Nov. 2014
  • But the cross-chiral ribozyme binds based on the molecule’s shape rather than its sequence.
    — Quanta Magazine, 25 Aug. 2016
  • Sam will have to infiltrate a weapons factory or hunt massive chiral creatures.
    — Gieson Cacho, Mercury News, 15 July 2025
  • Amino acids come in two mirror-image configurations, just like our left and right hands, called chiral forms.
    — Amirali Aghazadeh, The Conversation, 12 Dec. 2025
  • That occurs because the shape is chiral and cannot be transformed into its perfect mirror image.
    — Courtney Linder, Popular Mechanics, 30 Sep. 2019
  • The newest addition to the list is a chiral bose-liquid state, which scientists just observed for the first time.
    — Darren Orf, Popular Mechanics, 14 July 2023
  • Typically, these are very small twisted metal wires that are also chiral.
    — Courtney Linder, Popular Mechanics, 30 Sep. 2019
  • Such chiral holograms could be used to defeat counterfeiters.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 13 May 2016
  • In the new study, the researchers coupled chiral liquid crystals with fluorescent dyes that emitted red, green, or blue light.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 16 Nov. 2023
  • The drug also contained a chiral molecule that caused disastrous side effects in many babies.
    — Joanna Klein, New York Times, 14 June 2017
  • 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
  • When objects appear different in the mirror, scientists call them chiral.
    — Zack Savitsky, Wired News, 22 June 2025
  • The other route is the chiral vortical symmetry, which requires that the plasma be rotating.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 2 Aug. 2017
  • 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
  • Electrons with one spin orientation will move more efficiently across a chiral molecule in one direction than the other.
    — Yasemin Saplakoglu, Quanta Magazine, 6 Sep. 2023
  • Not everyone counts these different chiral and polarization states as distinct particle types.
    — Quanta Magazine, 15 June 2026
  • Earlier scientists had assumed that once the rearrangement began, any chiral information would be lost.
    — Prabhat Ranjan Mishra, Interesting Engineering, 8 Jan. 2026
  • Like how your left glove fits only your left hand and your right glove your right hand, chiral molecules can interact only with other molecules of compatible handedness.
    — Kate Adamala, The Conversation, 11 Feb. 2025
  • To make the calculation possible, chiral effective field theory employs a math trick sometimes used in high school calculus.
    — Quanta Magazine, 4 Dec. 2012
  • But, strangely, the calculation that came closest used an oversimplified model of the nuclear force—not the chiral effective field theory.
    — WIRED, 10 Aug. 2023
  • The formation and dissolution of these living chiral crystals is driven entirely by the embryos' development process.
    — The Physics Arxiv Blog, Discover Magazine, 24 May 2021
  • Researchers highlighted that chiral molecules are asymmetric or non-superimposable on their mirror image.
    — Prabhat Ranjan Mishra, Interesting Engineering, 8 Jan. 2026
  • To prove this wasn’t a fluke, a parallel study published in Nature Communications used the exact same laser-light technique on a different chiral material.
    — Mrigakshi Dixit, Interesting Engineering, 26 May 2026
  • Early in the game, it is revealed that the US government used braindead pregnant women from Mexico to fuel experiments on chiral networks.
    — G Kirilloff, Forbes.com, 11 Aug. 2025
  • 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
  • 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
  • Traditional biosignature approaches focus on searching for specific compounds, such as certain amino acids or lipid structures, or for chiral preferences, like left-handedness.
    — Amirali Aghazadeh, The Conversation, 12 Dec. 2025
  • However, the dirt reacting with chiral selectivity would change the picture dramatically.
    — David Warmflash, Discover Magazine, 20 July 2016

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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