Chiral Carbon Dots Derived from Serine with Well-Defined Structure and Enantioselective Catalytic Activity
Mengling Zhang, Wanru Zhang, Xing Fan, Yurong Ma, Hui Huang, Xiting Wang, Yang Liu, Haiping Lin, Youyong Li, He Tian, Mingwang Shao, Zhenhui Kang
Abstract
Carbon dots (C-Dots), with unique properties from tunable photoluminescence to biocompatibility, show wide applications in biotechnology, optoelectronic device and catalysis. Chiral C-Dots are expected to have strongly chirality-dependent biological and catalytic properties. For chiral C-Dots, a clear structure and quantitative structure–property relationship need to be clarified. Here, chiral C-Dots were fabricated by electrooxidation polymerization from serine enantiomers. The oxidized serine has a reversed chiral configuration to serine, which leads to the chiral C-Dots possessing inverse handedness compared with their raw materials. Electron circular dichroism spectrum, together with other diverse characterization techniques and theoretical calculations, confirmed that these chiral C-Dots (2–7 nm) have a well-defined primary structure of polycyclic dipeptide and possess a spatial structure with a c -axis of hexagonal symmetry and two cyclic dipeptides as the spatial structural unit. These chiral C-Dots also show enantioselective catalytic activity on DOPA enantiomers oxidation.