A β-cyclodextrin covalent organic framework used as a chiral stationary phase for chiral separation in gas chromatography

Chiral covalent organic frameworks (CCOFs) featuring chirality, stability, and good porosity have attracted a considerable amount of attention due to their important applications, such as asymmetric catalysis, chiral separation, and chiral recognition. In this study, a β-cyclodextrin (β-CD) covalent organic framework (β-CD-COF) diluted with polysiloxane OV-1701 was explored as a novel chiral stationary phase (CSP) for gas chromatography (GC) separation of racemates. The β-CD-COF coated capillary column had excellent selectivity, not only for the separation of linear alkanes, linear alcohols, fatty acid methyl esters mixture, the Grob mixture and positional isomers, but also for the resolution of chiral compounds, including chiral alcohols, aldehydes, ethers, and amino acid derivatives. In addition, the β-CD-COF-coated capillary column presented good repeatability and reproducibility. This work indicated the great potential of the CCOFs coated capillary column for the chromatographic separation of enantiomers.