Title: Peptide-Encoded Chiral Inorganic Nanomaterials
Speaker: Prof. Ki Tae Nam, Seoul National University
Abstract:
Evolution has refined biological structures from small molecules to entire organisms at the nanoscale, microscale, and macroscale to be chiral—that is, mirror dissymmetric. Chiral nanoscale materials that mimic, refine, and advance biological chiral geometries can be designed to engineer optical, physical, and chemical properties for photonics, sensing, catalysis, and biomedicine applications. The idea that inorganic materials can be chiral seems to be counterintuitive. This talk will discuss a new mechanism that can generate chiral nanomaterials based on the interaction between chiral peptides and the high index plane of the metal surface. The enantioselective interaction of chiral molecules and high-Miller-index facets can break the mirror symmetry of the metal nanocrystals. I will also discuss the interesting optical properties of these chiral gold plasmonic nanoparticles synthesized by peptides and amino acids. The resulting 432 symmetric chiral morphology results in the highest dissymmetry factor (g) and efficient coupling with other materials. I believe that this synthetic approach for the chirality control of inorganic nanomaterials can have a lot of potential to maximize the light-matter interaction, resulting in many optical, electronic, and biological applications.
References
- “Enantioselective Sensing by Collective Circular Dichroism,” Nature. 2022, 612, 470.
- “Amino-Acid- and Peptide-Directed Synthesis of Chiral Plasmonic Gold Nanoparticles,” Nature. 2018, 556, 360.