Design and synthesis of chiral single-armed molecular tweezers derived from α-hyodeoxycholic acid

A novel type of molecular tweezers with different chiral center and cleft has been designed and prepared by using α-hyodeoxycholic acid as spacer and d/l-amino acid methyl ester as chiral arm attached at 3-position. Their structures were elucidated by 1H NMR, FTIR and elemental analysis. Their recognition properties for various d/l-amino acid methyl esters were also investigated. The preliminary results indicated that these chiral single-armed molecular tweezers exhibited good recognition ability for d/l-amino acid methyl esters with high association constant (up to 5.24 × 103 L mol−1).