Publication date: 28th August 2024
Chirality can be transmitted between various media and size scales, from spinning elementary particles or chiral molecules to mesoscopic and macroscopic structures through electromagnetic fields or emergent spin structures. These transmission processes. The transmission mechanism of chirality information, which can be expressed in the intra-inter-atomic/molecular interaction, is extremely complex and never ceases to fascinate scientists. When investigating systems spanning a large size range, hierarchical nanostructures based on molecular assemblies represent promising structures that allow us to fill in the gap that is difficult to assess from both top-down and bottom-up approaches.
For several decades, based on the molecular assembly, we have developed helical nanostructures with controlled sizes of the order of 10-100 nm and handedness, which have shown very promising properties not only as fundamentally interesting shaped objects with intriguing properties but also as helical platforms transferring the chiral information between very small to large objects and vice-versa, from electrons, atoms, molecules or large polymers and even nanoparticles. Through such interaction, we have shown exciting examples of their use in chiral induction, amplification, crystallisation, reaction, and chiral recognition.