New approach for chiral separation: from polysaccharide-based materials to chirality-responsive polymers

Abstract

Chiral separation that is closely related to daily life is a meaningful research. Polysaccharide-(e.g., cellulose, amylose derivatives) based chiral packing materials afford powerful chiral stationary phases (CSPs) toward a broad range of racemic compounds. However, considering the explosive growth of specific chiral drugs, the separation efficiencies of these CSPs need further improvement, which calls for new approaches and strategies. Smart polymers can change their physical or chemical properties dynamically and reversibly according to the external stimuli (e.g., thermo-, pH, solvent, ion, light, critical parameters for chromatographic separation) exerted on them, subsequently resulting in tunable changes in the macroscopic properties of materials. In addition to their excellent controllability, the introduction of chiral characteristics into the backbones or side-chains of smart polymers provides a promising route to realize reversibly conformational transition in response to the chiral analytes. This dramatic transition may significantly improve the performance of materials in chiral separation through modulating the enantioselective interactions between materials and analytes. With the help of chirality-responsive polymers, intelligent and switchable CSPs could be developed and applied in column-liquid chromatography. In these systems, the elution order or enantioselectivity of chiral drugs can be precisely modulated, which will help to solve many challenging problems that involve complicated enantiomers. In this paper we introduce some typical examples of smart polymers that serve as the basis for a discussion of emerging developments of CPSs, and then briefly outline the recent CSPs based on natural and certain synthetic polymers.