(449at) Enantioselective Separations Using Supported Liquid Crystalline Membranes

The production of optically pure enantiomers is a critical issue in fields including pharmaceuticals, foods, and agrochemicals. In the case of pharmaceuticals, often only one drug enantiomer is effective while the other enantiomer is ineffective or even toxic. Small molecule thermotropic liquid crystals (LCs) exhibit self-assembled orientations such as smectic, nematic, and isotropic phase depending on temperature changes. With an addition of chiral dopants, LC molecules in nematic phase oriented along one direction are reoriented in a helical way known as cholesteric liquid crystal (ChLC) phase. Herein we report a novel ChLC embedded polymer membranes, which features transport phenomena of membrane chromatography through the membrane pores. The ChLC phase induced by adding cholesterol-based chiral dopants in nematic LC phase exhibits left-handed chirality^, at low temperature below 40°C and left-handed enantiomers transport slower than right-handed enantiomers due to the interactions between left-handed enantiomer and left-handed chiral phase in the membrane. The LC membranes showed selectivity up to 1.17 for the porous membranes by the interactions between the lefthanded S-1-phenylethanol and the lefthanded LC surface.