Host-guest assembly for highly sensitive probing of a chiral mono-alcohol with a zinc trisporphyrinate.

A zinc trisporphyrinate has been developed as a chirality sensor for chiral mono-alcohols. In its structure, there are two "spaces" surrounded by three porphyrin moieties, which allow guests to fill in. It has shown extremely high CD sensitivity for a chiral mono-alcohol with a naphthyl substituent, 1-(1-naphthyl)ethanol, at μM level, which is at least three orders of magnitude lower concentration than previous reports. A crystallographic study of the host-guest complex reveals the binding of 1-(1-naphthyl)ethanol to the zinc trisporphyrinate is greatly enhanced by multipoint interactions, such as coordination interactions, hydrogen bonding, π-π and CH···π interactions etc. Spectroscopic studies suggest the corresponding binding constant K is over 10 M, which is two or three orders of magnitude larger than other mono-alcohols. Among porphyrin systems, this trisporphyrin have the strongest binding affinity for 1-(1-naphthyl)ethanol, which leads to the highest CD sensitivity.