Single isomer cyclodextrins as chiral selectors in capillary electrophoresis

Since decades, cyclodextrins are one of the most powerful selectors in chiral capillary electrophoresis for the enantioseparation of diverse organic compounds. This review concerns papers published over the last decade (from 2009 until nowadays), dealing with the capillary electrophoretic application of single isomer cyclodextrin derivatives in chiral separations. Following a brief overview of their synthetic approaches, the inventory of the neutral, negatively and positively charged (including both permanently ionic and pH-tunable ionizable substituents) and zwitterionic CD derivatives is presented, with insights to underlying structural aspects by NMR spectroscopy and molecular modeling. CE represents an ideal tool to study the weak, non-covalent supramolecular interactions. The published methods are reviewed in the light of enantioselectivity, enantiomer migration order and the fine-tuning of enantiodiscrimination by the substitution pattern of the single entity selector molecules, which is hardly possible for their randomly substituted counterparts. All the reviewed publications herein support that cyclodextrin-based chiral capillary electrophoresis seems to remain a popular choice in pharmaceutical and biomedical analysis.

Chiral recognition of dipeptide methyl esters by an anionic beta-cyclodextrin

Chiral recognition of dipeptide methyl esters by anionic heptakis[6-carboxymethylthio-6-deoxy]-beta-cyclodextrin (per-CO(2)(-)-beta-CD) was studied in D(2)O at pD 7.0 by means of (1)H NMR spectroscopy. The methyl esters of alanylalanine (Ala-Ala-OMe), alanylleucine (Ala-Leu-OMe), alanyltryptophan (Ala-Trp-OMe), glycyltryptophan (Gly-Trp-OMe), valyltryptophan (Val-Trp-OMe), leucyltryptophan (Leu-Trp-OMe), and tryptophylalanine (Trp-Ala-OMe) were used as the dipeptides. The binding constant (K) determined from NMR titration increases in the order Ala-Ala-OMe < Ala-Leu-OMe < Ala-Trp-OMe, suggesting that van der Waals interactions between the host and the guest participate in complexation. Coulomb interactions between the protonated dipeptide methyl esters and the anionic host seem to be another attractive force. Per-CO(2)(-)-beta-CD interacts with the (R,R)-enantiomers of the dipeptide methyl esters more strongly than the (S,S)-enantiomers. Such enantioselectivity corresponds to that for alpha-amino acid methyl esters such as Leu-OMe and Trp-OMe, whose (R)-enantiomers are the preferable guests. The enantioselectivity is mainly dominated by amino acid residue at the C-terminal and chirality at the N-terminal residue plays an assistant role. An asymmetrically twisted shape of the host cavity may be essential for chiral recognition.