Chiral phenomena are ubiquitous in nature from macroscopic to microscopic, including the high chirality preference of small biomolecules, e.g. L-amino and D -saccharide, special steric conformations of bio-macromolecules induced by it, e.g. DNA, as well as chirality-triggered biological and physiological processes. The introduction of molecule chirality onto the surface of gold nanoclusters lead to the generation of chiral gold nanoclusters, which provides a new platform for controlling chirality signal transmission from molecular level to nanoscale level. As one of most intensively investigated materials with unique properties of both chiral-molecule and gold nanoclusters, chiral gold nanoclusters have application in molecular detection, chiral catalysts, chiral recognition and many other areas. This critical review gives a brief introduction to the recent advances in this field. We start from the preparation of chiral gold nanoclusters, and further characterize their structures to find out key factors governing the chiroptical properties, further introduce some hot applications and finally discuss the future developments and challenges of chiral gold nanoclusters.

Contents
1 Introduction
2 Synthesis and characterization of gold nanoclusters
2.1 Synthesis of chiral gold nanoclusters
2.2 Purification and isolation
2.3 Characterization of chiral gold nanoclusters
3 Properties of chiral gold nanoclusters
3.1 Special optical activity
3.2 The origin of chirality
4 Application of chiral gold nanoclusters
4.1 Chiral catalysis
4.2 Chiral recognition
4.3 Potential application
5 Conclusion and outlook