Enantiomer composition determination preparation

Various chiral derivatizing agents have been reported for the determination of enantiomer compositions. One example is determining the enantiomeric purity of alcohols using 31P NMR.28 As shown in Scheme 1-8, reagent 20 can be readily prepared and conveniently stored in tetrahydrofuran (THF) for long periods. This compound shows excellent activity toward primary, secondary, and tertiary alcohols. To evaluate the utility of compound 20 for determining enantiomer composition, some racemic alcohols were chosen and allowed to react with 20. The diastereomeric pairs of derivative 21 exhibit clear differences in their 31P NMR spectra, and the enantiomer composition of a compound can then be easily measured (Scheme 1-8). 

For a nonracemic mixture of enantiomers prepared by resolution or asymmetric synthesis, the composition of the mixture was given earlier as percent optical purity (equation 1), an operational term, which is determined by dividing the observed specific rotation (Mobs) of a particular sample of enantiomer with that of the pure enantiomer ( max), both of which were measured under identical conditions. Since at the present, the amount of enantiomers in a mixture is often measured by nonpolarimetric methods, use of the term percent optical purity is obsolete, and in general has been replaced by the term percent enantiomeric excess (ee) (equation 2) introduced in 197163, usually equal to the percent optical purity, [/ ] and [5] representing the relative amounts of the respective enantiomers in the sample. 

The 3-hydroxyacid esters were isolated from the aroma extracts by preparative GC and their enantiomeric composition was determined by capillary GC separation of R-(+)-MTPA-derivatives. These investigations showed that the fruits contain different enantiomers of 3-hydroxyacid esters. 

Thus, with one chiral component, it is possible to obtain monomers enriched in enantiomers of opposite configuration depending on the conditions of preparation of the initiator which are determining the composition of the latter. 

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