Nanomaterials and Nanotechnology ARTICLE Polarimetric Detection of Enantioselective Adsorption by Chiral Au Nanoparticles – Effects of Temperature, Wavelength and Size Invited Article Nisha Shukla2, Nathaniel Ondeck1, Nathan Khosla1, Steven Klara1, Alexander Petti1 and Andrew Gellman1* 1 Department of Chemical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA 2 Institute of Complex Engineered Systems, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA * Corresponding author(s) E-mail:
[email protected] Received 01 November 2014; Accepted 07 January 2015 DOI: 10.5772/60109 © 2015 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract 1. Introduction R- and S-propylene oxide (PO) have been shown to interact The importance of chirality arises from the need of the enantiospecifically with the chiral surfaces of Au nanopar‐ pharmaceutical industry, and other producers of bioactive ticles (NPs) modified with D- or L-cysteine (cys). This compounds, for chemical processes that are enantioselec‐ enantiospecific interaction has been detected using optical tive and thereby produce enantiomerically pure chiral polarimetry measurements made on solutions of the D- or products. [1-4] This is one of the most challenging forms of L-cys modified Au (cys/Au) NPs during addition of chemical synthesis and is critical to the performance of racemic PO. The selective adsorption of one enantiomer of bioactive chiral products. Ingestion of the two enantiomers the PO onto the cys/Au NP surfaces results in a net rotation of a chiral compound by a living organism can result in of light during addition of the racemic PO to the solution.