What is a recemate?

Answer 1

In chemistry, a racemic mixture is one that has equal amounts of left- and right-handed enantiomers of a chiral molecule. The first known racemic mixture, or racemate, was 'racemic acid', which Pasteur found to be a mixture of the two enantiomeric isomers of tartaric acid. A racemate is optically inactive: because the two isomers rotate plane-polarized light in opposite directions they cancel out, therefore a racemic mixture does not rotate plane-polarized light. In contrast to the two separate enantiomers, which generally have identical physical properties, a racemate often has different properties compared to either one of the pure enantiomers. Different melting points and solubilities are very common, but different boiling points are also possible.