More than 80% of drugs in the worldwide market are chiral drugs, and typically one enantiomer has positive therapeutic effect while another may have side or even fatal effect, due to biomolecular homochirality. It is of fundamental significance to differentiate an enantiomer from its mirror image (i.e., enantiodifferentiation), through monitoring optical activity of, e.g., circular dichroism (CD) denoting differential absorption of left- and right-handed circularly polarized light (CPL) in the UV-visible region. However, sub-wavelength molecular dimensions substantially prevent enantiomers from effectively perceiving the different circular polarization states, leading to low optical activity (OA). In this presentation, a new method will be introduced to enhance enantiomeric OA. Enantiomers are grafted on helical nanoparticles (HNPs) with sub-5-nm helical pitch, which are deposited by glancing angle deposition (GLAD) with fast substrate rotation, leading to an amplification of OA in roughly one order of magnitude. Adsorption configuration of enantiomers are simulated to reveal that the OA enhancement may be ascribed to the supramolecular chiral assembly of the enantiomers on the helical surface, which is sensitive to the helicity of HNPs. This work devices a new method to operate sensitive enantiodifferentiation, which is of urgent demand for chiral pharmaceutical production, food quality control, and environmental pollution monitoring.<br/>

Helical nanoparticle-induced enhancement of molecular optical activity

256th National Meeting (2018)

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