Chiral nanostructured materials for chiral discrimination and separation

Abstract Chiral nanostructured materials have emerged to be an influential class of high-performance materials used in areas ranging from enantioselective sensing, separation, and catalysis to optoelectronics. The materials are highly sophisticated and involve chiral metal-organic frameworks, covalent organic frameworks, carbon dots, and quantum dots etc. Owing to properties such as enantioselectivity, reproducibility, and catalytic properties, facilitating their incorporation into multifunctional systems these materials offer remarkable enantiomeic separations, environmental monitoring, and sustainable energy. In the past few years, various synthetic strategies such as chiral ligands, templating techniques, and environmentally friendly synthetic methods have been investigated to achieve improved chiral materials. Great advances have been achieved in chromatographic performance and scalability toward chiral membranes, composite materials, and MOFs- and COFs-based stationary phases. Furthermore, multi-mode platforms combining fluorescence, magnetism, and other recognition approaches show vast potential for label-free real-time enantiomeric detection. Here, we review the interdisciplinary advancement in the area of nanostructured chiral materials focusing on synthetic strategies, characterization, and enantiorecognition performance of common chiral organic compounds and drugs.