On April 29, a research paper entitled "Triptycene-based Chiral Porous Polyimides for Enantioselective Membrane Separation" was online published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, which was performed by Prof. Chun Zhang’s group from National Engineering Research Center for Nanomedicine, College of Life Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology.
Resolution of racemic mixtures is meaningful because the enantiomers often exhibit different biological and pharmacological responses. In recent years, membrane separation technologies provided a promising method for enantiomer separation owing to their advantages of continuous operation and low energy consumption. However, the contradiction between permeability and enantioselectivity of membranes limited the application of membrane separation technologies in chiral separation. Chiral porous polymer-based membranes provide both permeability and enantioselectivity to overcome the well-defined trade-off between the permeability and selectivity for the enantiomers.
Professor Chun Zhang’s group has been engaged in the synthesis and application of organic porous materials for a long time. In this paper, they constructed a couple of chiral porous polyimides (R-FTPI and S-FTPI) by chiral 2, 6-diaminotriptycenes and cast them into membranes which displayed good chiral separation and permeation of racemic mandelic acid, 2-naphthyl-1-ethanol and 1,1'-binaphthyl-2,2'-diol.
PhD candidate Qing-pu Zhang, Postdoctoral fellow Dr. Zhen Wang and undergraduate Zhe-wen Zhang from Huazhong University of Science and Technology are co-first authors. Profs. Chun Zhang from Huazhong University of Science and Technology is the corresponding authors. Master Tian-long Zhai, Jing-jing Chen and PhD candidate Hui Ma from the College of Life Sciences and Technology participated in part of the work. Prof. Bien Tan from School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering provided constructive advice and suggestions for this paper. This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and National Undergraduate Program for Innovation and Entrepreneurship of China
