Creating chirality in the inner walls of silica nanotubes through a hydrogel template: chiral transcription and chiroptical switch.

An L- or D-glutamic acid based bolaamphiphile was found to form uniform helical nanotubes in water, which were used as the template to generate silica nanotubes. The formed silica nanotubes have supramolecular chirality in the inner walls, and were further used to load photoactive azobenzene moieties to realize a chiroptical switch.