Conspectus
Chirality
is a fundamental property of a molecule, and the significant
progress in chirality detection and quantification of a molecule has
inspired major advances in various fields ranging from chemistry,
biology, to biotechnology and pharmacology. Chiral molecules have
identical molecular formulas, atom-to-atom linkages, and bonding distances,
and as such they are difficult to distinguish both sensitively and
selectively. Today, most new drugs and those under development are
chiral, which requires technological developments in the separation
and detection of chiral molecules. Therefore, rapid and facile methods
to detect and discriminate chiral compounds are necessary to accelerate
advances in many research fields. The challenges in analysis stem
from the obvious fact that chiral molecules have the same physical
properties. Although significant progress on the detection of enantiomeric
composition has been achieved in the past decade, in order to fully
realize the capacity of chiral molecular interrogation, highly sensitive
and selective, portable, and easy-to-use detection remains challenging
because of the limitation of conventional techniques.
Soft nanoarchitectonics
is a new concept for the fabrication of
functional soft material systems through harmonization of various
actions including atomic/molecular-level manipulation, chemical reactions,
self-assembly and self-organization, and their modulation by external
fields/stimuli. Soft nanoarchitectonics has been widely used as a
key enabling technology for integrating predefined molecular functionalities
including electrochemical, optical, catalytic, or biological properties
into biosensing devices, which provides exciting opportunities to
design, assemble, and fabricate tailored nanosystems to enable new
sensing strategies for chiral molecules.
In this Account, we
aim to concisely discuss how these molecule-inspired
soft nanoarchitectonics work for enantioselective sensing. We will
first outline the basic principle and mechanistic insights of the
soft nanoarchitectonics approach for enantioselective sensing, and
then we will describe the new breakthroughs and trends in the area
that have been most recently reported by our groups and others. There
will also be a discussion on the merits of soft nanoarchitectonics
based sensing in comparison to conventional analytical methods. Finally,
with this Account, we hope to spark new chiral molecule sensing strategies
by fundamentally understanding chiral recognition and engineering
soft nanoarchitectonics with programmable structures and predictable
sensing properties.