Left-handed nanoparticles are far better vaccine adjuvants than their mirror images

Left-handed gold nanopropellers are more than 1000-fold more efficient as flu vaccine adjuvants in mice as their right-handed counterparts, scientists have discovered. This is the first time immune response has been shown to differ depending on nanoscale chirality.

As biological molecules are often chiral, they usually interact differently with each enantiomer of a chiral molecule. But nanoparticles are much larger than most molecules, so it was unclear whether proteins would be able to distinguish enantiomeric particles. Moreover, chiral nanoparticles often contain two types of chirality: one corresponding to chiral ligands and one corresponding to the whole particle’s geometry.