Nanoparticles Illustration

Nanoparticle Illustration - Magazine Cover Dr. Phd Kuznetsova explains: It is well known that even tiny additions of chiral cysteine molecules lead to the formation of nanoparticles with chiral shapes and exceptional optical activity. But does optical activity continue to increase with higher cysteine concentrations? As always, everything turned out to be complex and nonlinear. Beyond chirality, cysteine also affects the particle shape: increasing its concentration leads to the formation of spikes and further increases cause their chaotic branching — significantly influencing the optical properties. To bring order to this chaos and statistically describe the resulting structures, we applied graph theory. The software Structural GT was developed for constructing graphs based on TEM images, which allowed us to establish correlations between graph parameters and optical activity. These highly branched particles with their highly developed surface and multi-level chirality have potential applications in asymmetric catalysis, sensing, chiral separation, and the development of bioactive materials. A huge thank you to everyone who contributed to this paper! Special thanks to my dear Anderson Toddy for creating the cover page artwork! By the way, if you also need an illustration, feel free to reach out! 😉 . https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsnano.4c12964 .