Enzyme-Driven Autonomous Swimmers for the Direct Detection and Quantification of Enantiomeric Excess.

Chirality is found throughout nature, and it occupies also a special place in chemistry, perhaps for historical reasons, but mainly as a result of the beneficial properties of chiral molecules across a diverse range of areas, from medicine to materials science. The artificial systems presented herein can be considered as models for the transmission of chiral information across different length scales. This ambitious aim has been achieved by developing autonomous enzyme-driven swimmers based on chiral conducting polymers. The combination of three main ingredients namely electrical conductivity, driving force originating from the enzyme and enantiodiscrimination capability, makes these novel miniaturized bipolar objects perfect candidates for a multipurpose detection of enantiomeric excess of chiral analytes, by correlating the dynamic output signal, in terms of trajectories, with the concentration of the molecular antipodes present in solution. [1] [1] S. Arnaboldi, G. Salinas, A. Karajić, P. Garrigue, T. Benincori, G. Bonetti, R. Cirilli, S. Bichon, S. Gounel, N. Mano, A. Kuhn, Nat. Chem. 13, 1241–1247 (2021).