Abstract
In response to the outburst of research in the field of synthetic medicinal chemistry, enantioselective chromatography methods based on the use of chiral stationary phases (CSPs) found immediate acceptance as the elective choice for the analytical determinations of the enantiomeric purity of synthetic compounds. In contrast to an initial scepticism, also the preparative-scale applications are gaining increasing recognition as a powerful alternative to enantioselective synthesis for the supply of pure enantiomers of bioactive compounds. The increasing success of liquid chromatography methods has been made possible thanks to the development of highly efficient CSPs allowing the enantioresolution of practically all the chemical classes of chiral compounds. However, only few CSPs are really suitable for preparative- scale applications, being the loading capacity is the major concern for preparativescale enantioseparations. The cellulose- and amylose-based CSPs present the highest loading capacity and enantiodiscrimination power, which makes these CSPs the most versatile and applicable for preparative-scale applications in all the applicable elution modes (reversedphase, normal-phase, and with polar-organic or polar-ionic eluents). However, also other types of CSPs have been successfully employed at this regard (brush-type phases, polyacrylamide and cross-linked di-allyltartardiamide phases as well as cyclodextrin, and glycopeptide containing phases).
Several instrumental methods exist for the determination of the absolute configuration of organic compounds in absence of known enantiopure reference standards. The most widely known are X-ray crystallography, followed by chirooptical methods [e.g., electronic and vibrational circular dichroism (ECD and VCD, respectively)] and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. All these aspects will be treated in the review.Keywords: Laboratory-scale preparative enantioresolution, high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), racemic approach, commercial chiral stationary phases, pharmaceutically relevant compounds, absolute configuration.
Graphical Abstract
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