Porous liquids are porous materials that have exhibited unique properties in various fields. Herein, we developed a method to synthesize the type I porous liquids via liquefaction of cyclodextrins by chemical modification. The cyclodextrin porous liquids were characterized by Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, NMR, matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization-time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS), circular dichroism (CD), and UV-vis spectroscopy. The measured ionic conductivity of the γ-cyclodextrin porous liquid was 500 times as great as that of its reactants, which was found to be the first instance with such great conductivity for a type I porous liquid. What is more, the γ-cyclodextrin porous liquid had been demonstrated experimentally to have outstanding chiral recognition ability toward pyrimidine nucleosides in water, which was further confirmed by computational simulations. Additionally, enantiomeric excess of the extracted nucleoside was achieved up to 84.81% by convenient extraction from the mixture of racemic nucleosides and γ-cyclodextrin porous liquid. The great features of the novel cyclodextrin porous liquids could bring opportunities in many fields, including the preparation of chiral separation materials, development of new drug screening mechanisms, and construction of chiral response materials.
Keywords: chiral recognition; chiral separation; cyclodextrin; deoxycytidine; deoxythymidine; nucleosides; porous liquid.