Chiral carbon

A chiral carbon, (also known as an asymmetric carbon) is a carbon atom which has 4 different atoms or groups of atoms attached to it. For each chiral carbon in a molecule there are 2 optical isomers. This increases exponentially with more chiral carbons, so a molecule with 2 chiral centers would have 4 optical isomers, and a molecule with 3 would have 8 optical isomers. This can be calcultated by 2ⁿ where n is the number of chiral carbons, as there are two ways the the atoms can be arranged at each chiral centre. In nature often only one optical isomer is produced, for example only L-isomer amino acids are produced in translation. However the D isomer is dominant for monosaccharides.