Homochiral Metal-Organic Frameworks with Tunable Nanoscale Channel Array and Their Enantioseparation Performance against Chiral Diols.

Enantioseparation is an integral process in the pharmaceutical industry, considering the ever-increasing demand for chiral medicine products. As a new material, porous metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have shown their potential application in this field because their structures are easy to adjust and control. Though chiral recognition between racemic substrates and frameworks has made preliminary progress, discussions of their size-matching effects are rare. Herein with the help of channel-tunable homochiral MOFs (HMOFs), diols of different sizes have been separated in good enantiomeric excess (ee%). In addition, the ee% reaches 67.4% for the first time for diols as large as 1,1,2-triphenyl-1,2-ethanediol, which turns out to be the most effective value so far.