Soft Nanoarchitectonics for Enantioselective Biosensing

Abstract

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.

Nanofabrication Techniques in Large-Area Molecular Electronic Devices

“…Nanoarchitectonics represents today a promising and powerful strategy in which the LB method yields a perfectly molecular organization within a 2D plane [295,296]. Therefore, because of the wide generality of the nanoarchitectonics concept, LB films can also be applied to a wide range of research fields with practical importance, such as materials production [297][298][299], sensing [300,301], catalysis [302,303], device [304,305], energy [306][307][308][309][310], or biological/biomedical applications [311][312][313][314], or even in the fabrication of smart textile-based sensors (TEX sensors) [311]. These studies underscore the almost limitless possibilities of the LB technique to fabricate well-ordered 2D films of a wide range of materials.…”

Nanoarchitectonics for Hierarchical Fullerene Nanomaterials

“…Functional material systems are prepared from nanoscale units such as atoms, molecules, and nanomaterials through combinations and selections of building units and processes including atom/molecular manipulation, chemical transformation, self-assembly/self-organization, field-controlled organization, material processing, and bio-related treatments [ 93 ]. Because this concept is general and applicable for a wide range of materials, the nanoarchitectonics concept has been used in various research fields such as material production [ 94 , 95 , 96 ], structural fabrication [ 97 , 98 , 99 ], catalysts [ 100 , 101 , 102 ], sensing [ 103 , 104 , 105 ], devices [ 106 , 107 , 108 ], environmental usage [ 109 , 110 , 111 ], energy-related applications [ 112 , 113 , 114 ], biochemical science [ 115 , 116 , 117 ], and biomedical applications [ 118 , 119 , 120 ]. Nanoarchitectonics strategies for materials creation from fundamental units of atoms and molecules could apply to any kind of material with any desirable function [ 121 ].…”

Gas-Induced Phase Transition of Dipeptide Supramolecular Assembly

“…[1][2][3][4] By precisely modulating the self-assembly pathways, supramolecular frameworks with distinct-ordered molecule alignment can be obtained. [5][6][7][8] Owing to the intrinsic dynamic and adaptive features, supramolecular systems are tailored through subtle variations in molecular arrangements, triggered by external stimuli (light, temperature, pressure, solvents, and chemicals). [9][10][11][12] In particular, controlled assembly of a single-component building block enables the formation of multiple phases with a rich diversity of intriguing physicochemical properties.…”