GEOMETRIC CHIRALITY PRODUCTS

Developed from Guye's "produit d'asymetrie" and formally similar to Ruch's chirality products, geometric chirality products are functions purely of molecular shape, without reference to chemical characteristics. In their normalized versions, geometric chirality products have all the attributes of a chirality measure, i.e. they are similarity invariant and dimensionless in the interval [-1, 1]. An application to Boy's model of the tetrahedron is presented, and a detailed study of the results for triangular domains in E2 is reported. According to this measure, the most chiral triangle is infinitely flat and infinitely skewed. The analysis leads to the paradoxical conclusion that the most chiral triangle is infinitesimally close to an achiral one. The results are compared with those obtained for an overlap measure of chirality, and the relationship between molecular models and measures of chirality is briefly discussed.