Study and quantification of the enantiodiscrimination power of four polymeric chiral LLCs using NAD 2D-NMR

Abstract

Identifying and understanding the role of key molecular factors involved in the orientation/discrimination phenomena of analytes in polymer-based chiral liquid crystals (CLCs) are essential tasks for optimizing computational predictions (molecular dynamics simulation) of the existing orienting systems, as well as designing novel helically chiral polymers as new enantiodiscriminating aligning media. From this perspective, we propose to quantify and compare the enantiodiscrimination power of four homochiral polymer-based lyotropic liquid crystals (LLCs) toward a given chiral solute using their ²H residual quadrupolar couplings (²H-RQCs) measured by anisotropic natural abundance deuterium 2D-NMR (ANAD 2D-NMR). Two families of chiral polymers are investigated in this study: (i) poly-peptide polymers (PBLG and PCBLL), and (ii) polyacetylene polymers (PDA and L-MSP, a new system never published so far). As model solute, we investigate the case of camphor, an interesting rigid bicyclic chiral molecule possessing ten ²H-RQCs (10 inequivalent monodeurated isotopomers per enantiomer). In order to analyse the orientational behaviour of each enantiomer in a single oriented sample, while simplifying the identification of the (D/L)-isomer signals on spectra, a D-isomer enriched scalemic mixture (ee(D) = 30%) was used. Orientational data of camphor in each mesophase were calculated for the first time using the computer program ConArch⁺, modified to accept ²H-RQCs as anisotropic data input. Differences in enantiodiscriminations provided by the four aligning systems are examined and discussed in terms of structural and chemical features between polymers. The new L-MSP mesophase described in this work exhibits very promising enantiodiscrimination capacities.