Plants learned to tell left from right — molecule by molecule — and scientists just watched how

Some molecules come in mirror-image twins — like left and right hands — that can smell or behave completely differently, which matters enormously when making medicines and perfumes. Plants have enzymes that tell the twins apart with exquisite precision, and nobody knew how that precision evolved. Now a team led by Dr. Bernhard Loll at Freie Universität Berlin, with colleagues in Austria and at Georgia Tech, has reconstructed the step-by-step evolution of one such enzyme family — the ones that turn the alcohol borneol into camphor — in work published in Nature Communications. It is a rare, detailed look at evolution inventing fine discrimination, one mutation at a time.