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Updated: Jun 21, 2025

Engineering Molecular Recognition with Bio-mimetic Polymers on Single Walled Carbon Nanotubes
Published on: January 10, 2017
Electrochemical chiral sensor for recognition of amino acid enantiomers with cyclodextrin-based microporous organic
Xuan Zhang1, Fang Wang1, Zilin Chen1
1Department of Radiation and Medical Oncology, Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University and Wuhan University, School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Wuhan, 430071, China; Key Laboratory of Combinatorial Biosynthesis and Drug Discovery, Ministry of Education, Hubei Province Engineering and Technology Research Center for Fluorinated Pharmaceuticals, Wuhan, 430071, China.
Background:
Chirality is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature, but enantiomers exhibit different pharmacological activities and toxicological effects. Therefore, Chiral recognition plays a pivotal role in various fields such as life sciences, chemical synthesis, drug development, and materials science. The synthesis of novel chiral composites with well-defined loading capabilities and ordered structures holds significant potential for electrochemical chiral recognition applications. However, the design of selective and stable electrochemical chiral recognition materials remains a challenging task.
Result:
In this work, we construct a simple and rapid electrochemical sensing platform for tryptophan (Trp) enantiomer recognition using cyclodextrin-modified microporous organic network as chiral recognition agent. CD-MON with chiral microenvironment was prepared by Sonogashira-Hagihara coupling reaction of the chiral molecule heptyl-6-iodo-6-deoxyβ-cyclodextrin and 1, 4-Diethynylbenzene. The adhesion of BSA makes CD-MON firmly fixed on the electrode surface, and as a chiral protein, it can improve the chiral recognition ability through synergistic effect. Chiral amino acids are in full contact with the chiral microenvironment during pore conduction of MON, and L-Trp is more stably bound to CD-MON/BSA due to steric hindrance, host-guest recognition and hydrogen bonding. Therefore, the electrochemical sensor can effectively identify tryptophan enantiomers (IL-Trp/ID-Trp = 2.02), and it exhibits a detection limit of 2.6 μM for L-Trp. UV-Vis spectroscopy confirmed the adsorption capacity of CD-MON towards tryptophan enantiomers in agreement with electrochemistry results.
Significance:
The prepared chiral sensor has excellent stability, reproducibility (RSD = 3.7%) and selectivity, realizes the quantitative detection of single isomer in tryptophan racemic and quantitative analysis in real samples with 94.0%-101.0% recovery. This work represents the first application of MON in chiral electrochemistry which expands the application scope of chiral sensors and holds great significance in separation science and electrochemical sensing.
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