Highly sensitive chiral recognition of amino propanol in serum with R-mandelic acid-linked calix[4]arene modified graphene

Abstract

Highly sensitive recognition of important chiral bioactive substances in complex biological fluids is a great challenge. An efficient chiral discrimination system for amino propanol enantiomers is reported based on R-mandelic acid calix[4]arene (FC4D) clicked graphene. Notably, taking advantages of both the functional calixarene and graphene, the proposed FC4D–G demonstrates extremely high sensitivity and selectivity toward the recognition of amino propanol enantiomers, with a detection limit at the nM level in a serum sample. More important, a visible macroscopic chirality-responsive wettability variation was also realized in this study.