Lanthanides complexes – Chiral sensing of biomolecules

Thanks to their dimensional versatility and ability to form complexes, lanthanides are increasingly employed for the chiral sensing of biomolecules. In this work two sensing techniques based on the coordination chemistry of lanthanides are reviewed in detail. Circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy exploits the coupling or binding of lanthanide complexes with chiral substrates, enabling their detection and study. This method is usually employed for the characterization of large biomolecules, i.e. DNA, proteins or amino acids, as well as anion-selective sensing and recognition. Circular polarized luminescence (CPL) can be efficiently employed for the detection of biological molecules when lanthanides are used as probes. In fact, their complexes result in great interest because their emission spectra can contain information about the symmetry and composition of the biomolecules.