Evolving climates and farming practices may undermine scientists’ efforts to predict the toxicity and persistence of many long-lived pollutants because pollution-degrading microbes can unexpectedly switch preferences from one to the other of chiral—or mirror-image—molecular forms of a pesticide.

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Buser, H.-R., and M.D. Müller. 1998. Occurrence and transformation reactions of chiral and achiral phenoxyalkanoic acid herbicides in lakes and rivers in Switzerland. Environmental Science & Technology 32:626.

Lipkin, R. 1994. New catalyst yields one-handed compounds. Science News 146(Aug. 13):102.

Wiberg, K., et al. 1998. Enantioselective analysis of organochlorines in the arctic marine food chain: Chiral biomagnification factors and relationships of enantiomeric ratios, chemical residues and biological data. Organohalogen Compounds 35:371.

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Hans-Rudolf Buser
Swiss Federal Research Station
CH-8820 Wädenswil
Switzerland

David L. Lewis
University of Georgia
Department of Marine Sciences
Athens, GA 30602
Web site: http://members.aol.com/lewisdavel

Daniel M. Sheehan
National Center for Toxicological Research
3900 NCTR Road
Jefferson, AR 72079

From Science News, Vol. 156, No. 18, October 30, 1999, p. 276. Copyright © 1999, Science Service.