Chirality, a never-ending source of confusion

In this Discussion a few points of confusion concerning chirality are clarified. The term chirodescriptive is proposed for such space groups that lack inversion centres, reflection planes, glide planes or rotary-inversion axes and thus can contain enantiopure, chiral objects. It is pointed out that chiral compounds can (and often do) crystallise in non-chirodescriptive space group when they occur as racemates and in such cases there is no incompatibility between chirality and mirror planes or centres of inversions. We also propose the term raceomorphism to describe the relationship between a conglomerate and a collection of racemic crystals of the same compound.