Chirality has an important impact in chemical and biological research, since most active substances possess chirality. Usually, the performance and properties of chiral enantiomers exhibit significant differences in terms of biochemical activity, toxicity, transport mechanism and pathways of metabolism. Thus, developing effective method to achieve chiral recognition is of great significance and has always been a hot topic in chemo/biological study. In recent years, the electrochemical technologies, which can offer many advantages over the other conventional methods, have received considerable attention in chiral recognition. In this review, a comprehensive and critical detail of the trends on electrochemical chiral recognition in the last 5 years have been presented. In addition, some critical challenges and prospects in the field of electrochemical chiral recognition are also discussed in the latter part.

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As a novel nanomaterial after graphene, molybdenum disulfide (MoS 2 ) has potential applications in electrochemical sensing and other fields, while the low electric conductivity of MoS 2 limits its application significantly. In this paper, carbon spheres (CSs) wrapped with molybdenum disulfide (CSs@MoS 2 ) novel nanostructure was successfully prepared via a green hydrothermal method and then used for firstly electrochemical sensing of 4-aminophenol (4-AP, one toxic pollutant). The morphology and structure of CSs@MoS 2 were characterized by scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, Raman spectroscopy and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. As an electrochemical sensor, CSs@MoS 2 nanohybrids modified electrode exhibits excellent electrochemical sensing performance toward 4-AP analysis owing to the synergetic advantages of MoS 2 and CSs. Under the optimized conditions, the detection limit of 4-AP obtained in this work is 3 nM and the linear range is 0.01-18.00 μM.

Construction of efficient and convenient sensors for recognition of chiral enantiomers is of much significance in the field of electrochemistry and life sciences. Herein, we designed an effective chiral interface for the successful identification of tryptophan (Trp) enantiomers by electrodepositing l-cysteine on the surface of glass carbon electrode modified with carbon black. The structure and morphology of the prepared sensor was characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and electrochemical methods. Compared with l-tryptophan (L-Trp), the sensor exhibits favorable chiral recognition towards D-tryptophan (D-Trp) with a separation coefficient of 2.50. Compared with existing studies on electrochemical chiral recognition of Trp enantiomers, our designed chiral platform boasts of a wider linear range (1.0-1400.0 μM) and lower limits of detection thus, 0.33 μM and 0.45 μM for L-Trp and D-Trp respectively. In addition, the proposed sensor has the capacity to recognize chiral molecules in Trp isomers mixture and the potential for the identification of other amino acids.

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