Now here's an oddity: medicinal chemists are used to seeing the two enantiomers (mirror image compounds, for those outside the field) showing different activity. After all, proteins are chiral, and can recognize such things - in fact, it's a bit worrisome when the enantiomers don't show different profiles against a protein target.

There are a few cases known where the two enantiomers both show some kind of activity, but via different binding modes. But I've never seen a case like this, where this happens at the same time in the same binding pocket. The authors were studying inhibitors of a biosynthetic enzyme from Burkholderia, and seeing the usual sorts of things in their crystal structures - that is, only one enantiomer of a racemic mixture showing up in the enzyme. But suddenly of their analogs showed both enantiomers simultaneously, each binding to different parts of the active site.

Interestingly, when they obtained crystal structures of the two pure enantiomers, the R compound looks pretty much exactly as it does in the two-at-once structure, but the S compound flips around to another orientation, one that it couldn't have adopted in the presence of the R enantiomer. The S compound is tighter-binding in general, and calorimetry experiments showed a complicated profile as the concentration of the two compounds was changed. So this does appear to be a real effect, and not just some weirdo artifact of the crystallization conditions.

The authors point out that many other proteins have binding sites that are large enough to permit this sort of craziness (P450 enzymes are a likely candidate, and I'd add PPAR binding sites to the list, too). We still do an awful lot of in vitro testing using racemic mixtures, and this makes a person wonder how many times this behavior has been seen before and not understood. . .