Azaheterocyclic diphenylmethanol chiral solvating agents for the NMR chiral discrimination of alpha-substituted carboxylic acids

RSC Adv. 2020 Sep 18;10(57):34605-34611. doi: 10.1039/d0ra06312f. eCollection 2020 Sep 16.

Abstract

A series of small-membered heterocycle probes, so-called azaheterocycle-containing diphenylmethanol chiral solvating agents (CSAs), have been developed for NMR enantiodiscrimination. These chiral sensors were readily synthesized were inexpensive and efficiently used for the chiral analysis of alpha-substituted carboxylic acids. The sensing method was operationally simple and the processing was straightforward. Notably, we propose (S)-aziridinyl diphenylmethanol as a promising CSA, which has excellent chiral discriminating properties and offers multiple detectable possibilities pertaining to the 1H NMR signals of diagnostic split protons (including 25 examples, up to 0.194 ppm, 77.6 Hz). Its ability to detect the molecular recognition of fluorinated carboxylic acids were further investigated, with a good level of discrimination via the 19F NMR spectroscopic analysis. In addition, an accurate enantiomeric excess (ee) analysis of the p-methoxyl-mandelic acid with different optical compositions have been calculated based on the integration of well-separated proton signals.