Research Highlights

One goal in hierarchical chiral-material design is to develop versatile water-dispersible sensors capable of enantioselective recognition in aqueous solutions. Such sensors would enable practical applications like chiral separation, catalysis, and pollutant detection.

“Conventional methods for developing chiral sensors typically take an ad hoc approach, where new sensors must be designed from the ground up to address specific needs,” explains Reiko Oda, principal investigator of an AIMR team. “A better strategy is to develop a platform that both amplifies chiral detection sensitivity and enables broader testing across various chiral and achiral components.”

In a recent article, Oda and co-workers used this strategy to develop a water-dispersible platform based on hybrid silica nanohelices that amplifies chiral sensitivity when porphyrin-based molecules are confined within the nanohelical structures¹.

The team demonstrated that the confinement of porphyrin derivatives—both chiral and achiral—within the nanohelical structures amplified by ten-fold the chiral optical activity of the porphyrin molecules, significantly enhancing the sensitivity of chiral recognition, especially for water-dispersible sensors.

“In this work, we have successfully integrated porphyrin-based receptors into water-dispersible silica nanohelices to obtain highly sensitive chiral sensors,” says Oda. “But more importantly, our innovative use of nanohelices provided a generalizable system for testing various chiral analytes without needing a unique sensor for each case.”

The team continues its collaboration with various groups from France, Italy, Estonia, Ireland, and Finland, with the ultimate goal of realizing a column capable of chiral separation.

(Author: Patrick Han)