Chiral Noncovalent Peptide Glasses for Highly Circularly Polarized Luminescence.

Abstract

Peptide-based noncovalent glasses exhibit natural origins, green synthesis conditions, and self-healing properties, representing a promising sustainable alternative to conventional glasses. However, developing chiral noncovalent peptide glasses with highly circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) is still a challenging task. Herein, a supramolecular-coordination synergistic induced strategy is reported for constructing enantiomeric noncovalent peptide glasses from carnosine (Car) enantiomers and metal ions (Zn²⁺, Eu³⁺, Tb³⁺, Gd³⁺) under ambient conditions. The resulting chiral Car(M) peptide glasses not only exhibit high optical transparency (>90%), large sizes, easily processable shapes, and high ambient self-healing performances, but also show programmable multicolor emission, chiral amplification, and full-spectrum CPL encoding. Due to the synergistic metal coordination and hydrogen-bonded supramolecular interactions, the obtained chiral Car(M) glasses reveal record-high and tunable CPL with dissymmetry factors (|g_lum|) up to 0.29. Leveraging the high transparency and multicolor chiral emission of Car(M) glasses, an anti-counterfeiting platform is demonstrated including flexible multicolor QR codes, filter-resolved patterns, polarization-sensitive Morse codes, and programmable dot-array encryption. This work fabricates new chiral noncovalent peptide glasses that exhibit rapid self-healing capabilities and high, tunable CPL performance, thereby pioneering a novel avenue for chiral photonic applications.