Title of funded project：Development of chirality-responsive polymer based chromatographic stationary phases and their applications in chiral separations

Funding agency：National Natural Science Foundation of China

Grant number：21275114

Total funding amount：CNY 800,000

Plentiful saccharides and their derivatives usually have complex structures, and highly specialized chirality. In the research of saccharide chemistry, one of the urgent topics is the separation and purification of saccharide components. On the other hand, the biological and physiological properties of various D-monosaccharides and oligosaccharides have been explored systematically, however, their respective L-enantiomers have not received sufficient focus although their potential roles in the physiological pathway still deserve in-depth investigation. How to enantioselectively recognize and separate these saccharide enantiomers is the critical factor limiting the research of L-saccharides, which is still a big challenge for materials scientists and chemists. On the basis of our previous works in the chirality-responsive polymeric materials, we plan to develop a series of chiral polymers in this project, the key components of which are the chiral peptide units with the capabilities of responding to the targeted saccharide enantiomers.

Then these polymers will be grafted on silica oxides microspheres and developed to be the chromatographic chiral stationary phases, which are designed to separate the enantiomers of saccharides utilizing the highly stereoselective interactions between materials and targeted species, as well as the obvious transformation of wettability of materials. In the next stage of this project, the separation performance of these novel chiral stationary phases towards various chiral disaccharides, oligosaccharides, polysaccharides and some simple glycopeptides will also be evaluated systematically. Compared with the traditional materials, this kind of chrial stationary phase will have obvious advantages, such as excellent enantioselectively, high loading efficiency, satisfied reversibility, rapid elution, while the dynamic separation process could be controlled conveniently and intelligently according the stimuli in the surrounding environment. Due to these reasons, it is believed that introducing chirality responsive materials into the field of separation will be an excellent application for this kind of material, which also provides an original strategy for the separation of various saccharides and their derivatives.