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Chirality in Nature

Chirality in Nature

Chirality is the most intriguing yet essential facet of nature, governing life’s biochemical processes and precision. It can be observed from a snail shell pattern in a macroscopic world to an amino acid, the minutest building block of life. Most of the snails around the world have right-coiled shells because of the intrinsic chirality in their genes. All the amino acids present in the human body exist in an enantiomerically pure state, except for glycine - the sole achiral amino acid.

Chirality

Chirality

Chirality is a term that describes the lack of mirror symmetry in an object. In other words, chiral objects cannot be superposed on their mirror images. For example, our feet are chiral, as the mirror image of the left foot, the right foot, cannot be superposed on the left foot.
Chiral objects exhibit a sense of handedness when they interact with another chiral object. For example, our left foot can only fit in the left shoe and not in the right shoe. Achiral objects — objects that have...

Prochirality

Prochirality

The concept of prochirality leads to the nomenclature of the individual faces of a molecule and plays a crucial role in the enantioselective reaction. It is a concept where two or more achiral molecules react to produce chiral products. A typical process is the reaction of an achiral ketone to generate a chiral alcohol. Here, the achiral reactant reacts with an achiral reducing agent, sodium borohydride, to generate an equimolar mixture of the chiral enantiomers of the product. For example, an...

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Assembly of Gold Nanorods into Chiral Plasmonic Metamolecules Using DNA Origami Templates

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Chiral plasmonic DNA nanostructures with switchable circular dichroism.

Robert Schreiber¹, Ngoc Luong², Zhiyuan Fan³

¹Fakultät für Physik and Center for Nanoscience, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, 80539 München, Germany.

Nature Communications

|December 17, 2013

Summary

Researchers developed switchable plasmonic metamaterials using nanoparticle helices. These materials can dynamically alter their circular dichroism spectra, enabling potential applications in optical devices and data storage.

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Area of Science:

Plasmonics
Chiroptical spectroscopy
Nanotechnology

Background:

Chiral molecules and plasmonic nanoparticles exhibit characteristic bisignate circular dichroism (CD) spectra.
These spectra arise from the superposition of signals from randomly oriented chiral objects.

Purpose of the Study:

To demonstrate reversible switching of optical response in nanoparticle helices.
To investigate directional circular dichroism in switchable plasmonic metamaterials.

Main Methods:

Alignment and orientation control of DNA-origami-scaffolded nanoparticle helices on a substrate.
Measurement of circular dichroism spectra at different orientations.

Main Results:

Reversible switching of optical response between two distinct CD spectra was achieved by toggling helix orientation.
Observed directional CD agreed with dipole approximation theory predictions.

Conclusions:

Dynamic metamaterials with switchable optical properties were created.
These materials offer new functionalities for soft matter-based optical devices, potentially enabling novel data storage or signal modulation.