Abstract
Chirality is a fundamental aspect of chemical biology, and is of central importance in pharmacology. Consequently there is great interest in techniques for distinguishing between different chiral forms of a compound. Chemical force microscopy is a technique that combines chemical discrimination with atomic force microscopy by chemical derivatization of the scanning probe tip. It has been applied to the study of hydrophobic and hydrophilic interactions1, the binding between biotin and streptavidin2,3 and between DNA bases4. Here we report on the use of chemical force microscopy to discriminate between chiral molecules. Using chiral molecules attached to the probe tip, we can distinguish the two enantiomers of mandelic acid arrayed on a surface, through differences in both the adhesion forces and the frictional forces measured by the probe.
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Acknowledgements
We thank S. O'Shea for discussions, G. Whitesides (Harvard University) and H.Bieybuck (IBM Zurich) for providing microcontact stamps, and R. Mellor for programming. We acknowledge financial support from Zeneca for a studentship (R.A.M.), and EPSRC for a postdoctoral fellowship (M.-E.T.).
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McKendry, R., Theoclitou, ME., Rayment, T. et al. Chiral discrimination by chemical force microscopy. Nature 391, 566–568 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/35339
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/35339
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