Congratulations to Jemin and Yuri on their recent publication, which presents a redox-responsive polymer with planar chirality to enable enantioselective separation of biomolecules.
Published in JACS, this work presents a bottom-up approach to designing chiral redox-responsive macromolecules by developing planar chiral ferrocene building blocks. Guided by chiral 2-oxazolines, the resulting selectors outperform point-chiral analogs in binding carboxylates. When integrated into electrodes, they enable selective amino acid separation through potential-assisted electrosorption and release. Density functional theory (DFT) reveals that the enantioselectivity arises from a synergistic interplay among the functional groups establishing planar chirality. This concept, combined with thoughtful electrochemical system design, paves the way for practical separation platforms in API and biomolecular purification.