Alignment media chiral

NMR spectra of chiral molecules aligned in a chiral liquid crystalline solvent. A method for the visualization of enantiomers using natural abundant filtered single and double quantum selective refocusing experiments has been proposed and its application to small chiral molecules demonstrated. A lyotropic liquid crystalline phase of an aqueous solution of polysaccharide xanthan gum has been reported as a scalable weak alignment medium for enantiodiscrimination of water soluble chiral molecules. ... 

RDCs are commonly used for the structure elucidation of proteins and nucleic acids nowadays. Only recently the approach was transferred back to also obtain structural information of small- to medium-sized organic molecules. The central application in this case is the determination of relative configurations of distant chiral and prochiral centres, and also conformational studies of biologically active molecules, for example the enantiomeric differentiation of small molecules in chiral alignment media can be achieved. 

Fig. 1. Schematic representation of (a) nematic, (b) smectic and (c) cholesteric (or chiral nematic) liquid crystalline phases. In the nematic phase only orientational correlations are present with a mean alignment in the direction of the director n. In the smectic phase there are additional layer-like correlations between the molecules in planes perpendicular to the director. The planes, drawn as broken lines, are in reality due to density variations in the direction of the director. The interplane separation then corresponds to the period of these density waves. In the cholesteric phase the molecules lie in planes (defined by broken lines) twisted with respect to each other. Since the molecules in one plane exhibit nematic-like order with a mean alignment defined by the director n, the director traces out a right- or left-handed helix on translation through the cholesteric medium in a direction perpendicular to the planes. When the period of this helix is of the order of the wavelength of light, the cholesteric phase exhibits bright Bragg-like reflections. In these illustrations the space between the molecules (drawn as ellipsoids for simplicity) will be filled with the alkyl chains, etc., to give a fairly high packing...

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