A chiral indolocarbazole foldamer displaying strong circular dichroism responsive to anion binding.

A chiral foldamer that consists of three indolocarbazoles and chiral amide residues folds into a helical conformation with the orientation bias, thus displaying characteristic CD signals. The X-ray crystal structure of its chloride complex was found to be a left-handed (M-) helix which stacks to give one-dimensional columnar arrays.