A mirror-image experiment: Sorting carbon nanotubes by L-DNA

DNA has found increasing applications in molecular engineering, yet its chiral property has rarely been utilized. Here, we report a mirror-image experiment using naturally occurring D-DNA and its enantiomer L-DNA to sort a chiral mixture of single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs). We find that parity conservation leads to a robust experimental outcome: changing DNA chirality results in handedness inversion of the purified nanotube. This finding provides a straightforward solution to the challenging problem of nanotube enantiomer sorting and a materials foundation for applications in fields such as spintronics and chiral sensing. To illustrate the latter, we show that enantiomeric pairs of DNA-SWCNTs can serve as bilateral chiral gauges for quantifying the degree of molecular chirality.