By mixing a small peptide with equal amounts of its mirror image, scientists have created an unusual protein structure known as a ‘rippled beta sheet’ and obtained images of it using x-ray crystallography. The rippled sheet is a distinctive variation on the pleated beta sheet, which is a well-known structural motif found in thousands of proteins, including important disease-related proteins. Linus Pauling and Robert Corey described the rippled beta sheet in 1953, two years after introducing the concept of the pleated beta sheet.