He did postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Katlenburg-Lindau and at the French Synchrotron Center LURE.
For his work on chirality, he was awarded the Horst-Pracejus-Prize of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (German Chemical Society) in 2011.
To test it on Earth, he worked with scientists at Leiden University in the Netherlands who were making artificial cometary ice.
In further experiments at his lab in Nice, he analyzed cometary ice analogs with multidimensional gas chromatography and detected ribose, one of the sugars that make up DNA.
[2] Further experiments at the French SOLEIL synchrotron showed that life's homochirality can also originate under interstellar conditions.