Carbonaceous meteorites and comets contain a diverse suite of carbon compounds. Meteorites have been delivering these compounds to the early Earth throughout the life of the solar system and therefore were likely to have played an important role in the origin and/or evolution of life. Among the classes of organic compounds found in carbonaceous meteorites are amino acids, amides, and sugar derivatives. Sugars and their derivatives are critical to the chemistry of life and are components of biopolymers such as DNA and RNA. This talk will focus on the optical and isotopic properties of certain meteorite sugar derivatives, sugar acids. In life as we know it, only one of two possible mirror-images (called “enantiomers”) of C compounds are used in proteins (the “L” amino acids) and nucleic acids (“D” sugars). Due to their close structural relationship to today’s sugars, determining the enantiomer ratios of ancient sugar derivatives may shed light on the beginnings of the properties that distinguish carbon compounds associated with living organisms on Earth.