Chirality Quantification for High-Performance Nanophotonic Biosensors

Recent advancements in chiral metabolomics have facilitated the discovery of disease biomarkers through the enantioselective measurement of metabolites, offering new opportunities for diagnosis, prognosis, and personalized medicine. Although chiral photonic nanomaterials have emerged as promising platforms for chiral biosensing, enhancing sensitivity and enabling the detection of biomolecules at extremely low concentrations, a deeper understanding of the relationship between structural and optical chirality is crucial for optimizing these platforms. This perspective examines recent methods for quantifying chirality, including the Hausdorff Chirality Measure (HCM), Continuous Chirality Measure (CCM), Osipov-Pickup-Dunmur (OPD), and Graph-Theoretical Chirality (GTC) measure. These approaches have advanced the understanding of chirality in both materials and biomolecules, as well as its correlation with optical responses. This work emphasizes the role of chiral quantification in improving biosensor performance and explores the potential of near-field chiroptical studies to enhance sensor capabilities. Finally, this work addresses key challenges and outline future research directions for advancing chiral biosensors, with a focus on improving nano-bio interface interactions to drive the development of next-generation sensing technologies.