Halogen-substituted phenylalanines as enantioselective selectors for enantioselective discrimination of amino acids: effect of halogen.

Halogen-substituted phenylalanines with a halogen X (X = F, Cl, Br or I) in the para position in the aromatic ring of L-phenylalanine are used as enantioselective selectors to explore the effect of the halogen substituent on the enantioselective discrimination of amino acids. Enantioselective discrimination is achieved by investigating the collision-induced dissociation spectra of the trimeric complex ion, [CuII(ref)2(A)-H]+, generated by electrospraying a solution of a mixture of D- or L-analyte amino acid (A), enantioselective reference ligand (ref) and CuCl2. The relative abundances of fragment ions resulting from the competitive loss of reference and analyte amino acids are considered for measuring the degree of enantioselective discrimination by applying the kinetic method. The enantioselectivity of the p-halogenated derivatives of L-Phe increases from fluorine to iodine for the studied amino acids (except for acidic amino acids). The validity of the present method has also been checked by cross enantioselective experiments using p-iodo-D-phenylalanine as the reference in place of p-iodo-L-phenylalanine. The enantioselectivity of fluoro-substituted L-phenylalanine is less than that obtained with L-phenylalanine. The high inductive effect of the fluorine atom decreases the strength of the pi-pi stacking interaction. The presence of halogen affects the enantioselectivity by inductive and steric effects.