A novel chiral terpyridine macrocycle as a fluorescent sensor for enantioselective recognition of amino acid derivatives.

Terpyridine macrocycle 1 is shown to be a strong chelating agent for organic ammonium salts and also a useful chromophore in fluorescent sensing. It exhibits very good enantioselectivity (K(obs)(S)/K(obs)(R)= 3.8) in chiral discrimination of alpha-phenylglycine methyl ester hydrochloride (PhEtOMe).