2025 AIChE Annual Meeting

(400ax) Amino-Acid-Derivd Metal-Organic Frameworks for Efficient Chiral Separation

Author

Chiral compounds have been widely applied in the agriculture, pharmaceutical and food industries. In 2022, the global market size of chiral chemicals has reached 77 billion dollars. Yet, most organic synthesis lacks selectivity, and the products often exist in the form of racemates. Driven by the strong demand for enantiopure chemicals, novel materials are required to separate various racemates efficiently. Herein, to construct sustainable materials at a low cost, we utilized organic ligands derived from natural amino acids, such as phenylalanine, to synthesize a series of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) featuring chiral cavities similar to the protein binding pockets. Interestingly, the topologies of these frameworks can be readily tuned through coordination chemistry, generating diverse pore environments to accommodate and recognize chiral guest molecules. As a result, the chiralized MOFs can separate drug intermediates at a record-high selectivity of 99.9% ee, which can also serve as the chiral stationary phase of high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and maintain its robustness for three months. In addition, the pore sizes of the amino-acid-derived MOFs can be engineered to accommodate large molecules with a molecular diameter over 2 nm, indicating their application potentials in the late-stage drug separation.