Chirality is one of the ubiquitous phenomena in biological systems. The left handed (L-) amino acids and right handed (D-) sugars are normally found in proteins, and in RNAs and DNAs, respectively. The effect of chiral surfaces at the nanoscale on cellular uptake has, however, not been explored. This study reveals for the first time the molecular chirality on gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) function...

correspondence correspondence Left is right, right is wrong T he cover illustration of the August 2009 issue of EMBO reports, although aesthetically pleasing, is unfortunately erroneous and could come as a shock to researchers in the chromatin field. Canonical nucleosomes are indeed left-handed, such as the nucleosomes in the left 'column' of chro-matin fibres on the cover. However, in the righ...

A series of cinnamoyl-terminated bolaamphiphiles were synthesized and their assemblies at the air/water interface were investigated. It was found that the assembly behaviour depended on the substituted groups on the cinnamoyl unit. The bolaamphiphile with 4-hydroxycinnamoyl head groups (HCDA) was found to assemble into a supramolecular nanotube, while the others formed only layer-structured fil...

A new series of chiral ureas containing one or two redox-active ferrocene units was synthesised and studied in order to investigate the effect of planar chirality and central chirality on electrochemical chiral sensing. Binding of chiral carboxylate anions in organic solvents through H-bond formation caused a negative shift in the potentials of the ferrocene/ferrocenium (Fc/Fc(+)) couples of th...

The transfer of chirality from nonchiral polymer networks to the racemic B2 phase of nonchiral banana-shaped molecules is demonstrated. This corresponds to the transfer of chirality from an achiral material to another achiral material. There are two levels of chirality transfers. (a) On a microscopic level the presence of a polymer network (chiral or nonchiral) favors a chiral state over a ther...

Chiral fields, i. e., electromagnetic fields with nonvanishing optical chirality, can occur next to symmetric nanostructures without geometrical chirality illuminated with linearly polarized light at normal incidence. A simple dipole model is utilized to explain this behavior theoretically. Illuminated with circularly polarized light, the chiral near-fields are still dominated by the distributi...

We investigate a nonequilibrium coarsening dynamics of a one-dimensional Ising spin system with chirality. Only spins at domain boundaries are updated so that the model undergoes a coarsening to either of equivalent absorbing states with all spins + or -. Chirality is imposed by assigning different transition rates to events at down (+-) kinks and up (-+) kinks. The coarsening is characterized ...

Imprinting of cholesteric textures in a polymer network is a method of preserving a macroscopically chiral phase in a system with no molecular chirality. By modifying the elastic properties of the network, the resulting stored helical twist can be manipulated within a wide range since the imprinting efficiency depends on the balance between the elastic constants and twisting power at network fo...

A mechanism for creating amino acid enantiomerism that always selects the same large-scale chirality is identified, and subsequent chemical replication and galactic mixing that would populate the Galaxy with the predominant species is described. This involves (1) the spin of the 14N in the amino acids, or in precursor molecules from which amino acids might be formed, that couples to the chirali...

The thermal properties of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) are of significant interest, yet their dependence on SWNT chirality has been, until now, not explored experimentally. Here, we used electrical heating and infrared thermal imaging to simultaneously study thermal and electrical transport in chirality-sorted SWNT networks. We examined solution processed 90% semiconducting, 90% metal...