A chemosensor has been developed by scientists in the US to speed up the quantitative stereochemical analysis of chiral amino alcohols and diamines. Faster stereochemical analysis will help progress the identification of new asymmetric catalysts.
Different enantiomers of chiral compounds can have similar physicochemical properties but their biological properties may bear no resemblance to each other. Drugs are often chiral molecules but there can be significant differences between the toxicities of enantiomers.
The administration of just the active enantiomer eliminates the toxic effects of other enantiomers and could make administering lower drug doses possible. Asymmetric catalysts that favour the production of one enantiomer over the other provide a way to produce an excess of desired enantiomers and can lower costs by avoiding the labour-intensive and time-consuming separation of enantiomers.
Driven by industrial demand for efficiency, researchers are producing many potential asymmetric catalysts for drugs and other compounds…
Read the full article in Chemistry World»
Read the original journal article in ChemComm:
Sensing of the concentration and enantiomeric excess of chiral compounds with tropos ligand derived metal complexes
Peng Zhang and Christian Wolf
Chem. Commun., 2013, 49, 7010-7012
DOI: 10.1039/C3CC43653E, Communication
