Enantiomeric Chirality Encoded Graphene And Electrochemical Chirality Detection

Graphene has attracted huge attention in the fields of hybrid materials,nano-electronic devices,energy storage,and chemical sensors due to its excellent physical-chemical properties.Graphene constructed by tightly packed hexagonal carbon atoms is a one-atom-thick nanofilm material;it is thus achiral.In this work,we proposed a way to encode conjugated amino enantiomeric chirality on graphene basal plane.First,a monolayer conjugated tryptophan enantiomers were integrated with graphene through π-πinteraction,and then the integrated graphene was heated as it was learned that this eliminates the carboxyl groups of tryptophan molecules,thus achieving the goal of encoding enantiomeric molecular chirality on graphene basal plane.We first encoded tryptophan molecular imprints on graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition using tryptophan enantiomers.The tryptophan molecular imprints on CVD graphene was observed for the first time using CS-corrected high-resolution transmission electron microscopy.On this basis,we also corroborated the existence of molecular imprints using some technics including Polarized optical microscope,Raman spectra,X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy,Energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy.In addition,we extended this chiral encoding method to chemically prepared graphene(i.e.rG-O).The encoding process was analysed by a variety of technologies as well,such as atomic force microscopy,X-ray diffraction,Thermogravimetry coupled with Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy,proving the suitability of this method for rG-O.Furthermore,these materials were used as electrodes to unfold the research on chemical discrimination of amino acid enantiomers.Last,the mechanism of creating molecular imprints on graphene basal plane and enantiomeric discrimination was tapped into by theoretical simulation.This chirality encoded graphene can be applied in other chiral related research,and the chirality encoding method is expected to be developed in other two-dimensional(2D)materials.