As we see the mirror image of our hand, many biological molecules such as DNA and proteins have left and right handed forms. We call this nature of handedness as the chirality of molecular structures. It is important to notice that we have right-handed sugars and left-handed amino acids, and there is a need for an effective method to screen pharmacologically active drugs as well as understanding the mechanisms of chiral interactions in living organisms. Here we describe a high-throughput integrated chiral analysis platform with microfluidics (hiCAP) for precise analysis of chirality in biological molecules and large-scale measurements of chiral activities of thousands of active drugs. We fabricate an integrated chiral plasmonic nanostructures with different chiral plasmonic resonance on hexagonal templates. We obtain the quantitative molecular chirality of active drugs by observing change of resonance of chiral plasmonic nanostructure after binding chiral drugs with amplified signal (< 1 ppm) due to highly efficient interaction of plasmon resonance with an external circularly polarized light. We demonstrate a large-scale heat-map plot on chip directly from the hiCAP for pharmacologically active drugs and chiral selective reactions. We expect that our hiCAP not only broaden understanding chiral activity of active drugs, but also provide a rapid analysis tool for drug discovery for personalized medicine.
Project end date: 02/16/16