Effects of Rigid Conjugated Groups: towards Improving Enantioseparation Performances of Chiral Porous Organic Polymers.

The construction of chiral porous materials for practical enantioseparation remains a great challenge. Since chiral compounds might display the distinctive spatial orientation in the diastereoisomeric complexes between enantiomers and selectors, we reasoned that the conjugated host framework might assist in the chiral recognition and thus enhance enantioseparation performances. In this regard, whereas porous organic polymers (POPs) with chiral selectors were considered as an ideal adsorbent, a new kind of POP, COP-1, was thus constructed via introducing amino acid, as a chiral selector, into rigid and conjugated building blocks in this work. Results show that enantiomeric model molecule and drugs are completely separated by gas or column chromatography with COP-1 as the chiral stationary phases (CSPs). Both theoretical and experimental analyses demonstrate that the introduction of conjugated groups generates different host-guest interactions indeed, and thus promotes the chiral separation performance. Our findings open up a new possibility for the practical application of enantioseparation at preparative scales.