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Chirality Transfer in Coassembled Organogels Enabling Wide-Range Naked-Eye Enantiodifferentiation

Yue, Bingbing; Yin, Liyuan; Zhao, Wandong; Jia, Xiaoyong; Zhu, Mingjie; Wu, Bin; Wu, Si; Zhu, Liangliang

By 27 January 2020No Comments

ACS Nano, 2019, vol 13, 11, pp. 12438-12444

DOI:10.1021/acsnano.9b06250

Abstract

Enantiodifferentiation is crucial in organic chemistry, pharmacochemistry, material chemistry, and life science. However, it remains tremendously challenging to achieve a broad enantioselectivity to different types of chiral substrates via a single-material design. Here, we report a coassembled organogel strategy with chirality transfer to make an enantioselective generality possible. This coassembly contains two components: a chiral rigid molecular linker and an achiral block copolymer. Different from routine helically packed chiral self-assemblies, chirality transfer from the linker to the copolymer directed the coassembly to form a phase-segregated twisted nanofiber, in cooperation with H-bonding and microphase segregation. An organogel was accordingly formed by the further cross-linking in ethanol, where the rigid chiral linker served as the scaffold. On this basis, the system becomes highly sensitive, enabling a naked-eye sensing toward the single enantiomer of a diverse series of chiral species (including axial, point, planar, and polymeric chirality) via gel-to-micelle transformation, due to the asymmetric interaction hampering the chirality transfer in the coassembly and destroying the hierarchical structure. Such a strategy, based on a significant amplification of the stereoselective interactions, facilitates a simple and straightforward way to distinguish a broad optical activity independent of devices.

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