Amino-Acid-Based chiral nanoparticles for enantioselective crystallization

Chirality is one of the key factors in molecular recognition, which is extremely important in many chemical, biological, and medical applications. Discovering efficient methods to produce and separate enantiomerically pure chiral compounds is critical for further development of pharmaceuticals, because enantiomers of drugs may have different pharmacologic and toxicological effects. Although the application of polymer particles in the nanometric scale would increase significantly the specific surface area and open up new possibilities, their synthesis remains very challenging. A conglomerate is an equimolar physical mixture of the individual homochiral crystals of the two opposite enantiomers. A acemic compound consists of crystals in which the two enantiomeric molecules of opposite chirality are paired up in the unit cell of the crystal lattice.