Visual detection of chiral arginine enantiomer based on Fabry-Pérot resonator with BSA grafted polymer brush insulator as transducer

Molecular chiral recognition is significant in chemical, biological, and pharmacological research communities. Herein, we proposed a layered metal-insulator-metal (MIM) Fabry-Pérot resonator with bovine serum albumin (BSA) grafted polymer brush as the mid-responsive insulator layer for visual discrimination of chiral Arginine (Arg) enantiomer. The as-prepared MIM resonator exhibits distinguishing spectral shifts and apparent color change in response to Arg with different chiral configurations, which the naked eye can easily perceive. In addition, the proposed MIM resonator also shows the advantages of reasonable specificity, easy integrability, and extensive universality. Together with all these advantages, we believe the proposed visual detection strategy may open exciting avenues for detecting chiral molecules, especially in cost-efficient and point-of-care detection of chiral biomarkers for clinical disease diagnosis and therapy follow-up.