Chiral quantum dots for bioapplications

Abstract

Chiral quantum dots (QDs), an emerging new class of artificial chiral materials, have attracted rapidly growing interest due to their fascinating chiral activity properties and their wide range of applications. For biological applications, understanding the origin of chiral QDs provides guidelines for designing chiral nanomedicines with enantiospecific properties, while increasing the intensity of chirality offers higher signal strength in vivo. Encouraged by the evolving discoveries of these novel artificial chiral materials, we believe it is necessary to systematically summarize the development of chiral QDs in biological applications. In this review, we summarize the mechanisms underlying the origin of chiral QDs and present examples where the presence of chirality in QDs is conferred by intrinsic chirality, ligand-induced chirality and self-assembled chirality. We then outline the tools for increasing the g-factor of chiral quantum dots, which is important for in vivo applications. Furthermore, some specific examples of chiral quantum dots in biological applications such as cancer and neurodegenerative disease therapy are discussed. Finally, we discuss how we can use chiral quantum dots to address some of the key challenges in biological applications and also raise some important questions that remain to be answered in the future.