Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 7, 2026

Optical Trapping of Plasmonic Nanoparticles for In Situ Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy Characterizations
Published on: June 23, 2022
Multiscale Chirality in Gold Nanoflowers: Chiral Hotspots, Surface Asymmetry, and Molecular Recognition for
Youmei Jia1, Emily Xi Tan1,2,3, Rong Deng2,4
1Key Laboratory of Synthetic and Biological Colloids, Ministry of Education, International Joint Research Laboratory for Nano Energy Composites, School of Chemical and Material Engineering, Jiangnan University, Wuxi 214122, P. R. China.
Abstract:
Chiral plasmonic nanostructures have emerged as powerful probes of chirality, yet most rely solely on passive optical asymmetry and rarely exploit analyte manipulation strategies. This limitation constrains their sensitivity and generality across diverse molecular systems. Integrating chirality across multiple length scales offers new design rules for enantiospecific recognition. Herein, we report chiral gold nanoflowers (Au NFs) with three-dimensional helical petals that embed chirality hierarchically at the nano-, atomic, and molecular scales to couple electromagnetic enhancement with active analyte manipulation. The three-level chirality-driven recognition mechanism involves nanoscale chiral near-fields, atomic-level facet asymmetry that drives enantiospecific physisorption, and residual cysteine-mediated chemisorption. Despite a modest g-factor (2.4 × 10-3), these Au NFs achieve an analytical enhancement factor exceeding 108, enabling 100% accurate surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) discrimination of pharmaceutical enantiomers at sub-μM concentrations and multiplex mixture analysis with >95% accuracy. By incorporating analyte manipulation strategies, this work establishes multiscale chirality as a general principle for high-precision chiral recognition applicable to sensing, chiral catalysis, and chiroptical materials.
More Related Videos
10:59Author Spotlight: Tracking Electrochemistry on Single Nanoparticles with Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering Spectroscopy and Microscopy
Published on: May 12, 2023
06:19Author Spotlight: Advancing SERS Technology: Au@Carbon Dot Nanoprobes for Label-Free Analysis and Imaging
Published on: June 9, 2023
Related Concept Videos
Chirality
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...
Molecules with Multiple Chiral Centers
Chirality at Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Sulfur
A consequence of chirality is the need for enantiomeric resolution. While this is theoretically possible for all...
Prochirality
Chirality in Nature