Fabrication of chiral amino acid ionic liquid modified magnetic multifunctional nanospheres for centrifugal chiral chromatography separation of racemates.

As the rapid development of nanotechnology, the magnetic nanospheres modified with special chiral selective ligands show a great potentiality in enantiomeric separation. In this study, magnetic nanospheres modified with task-specific chiral ionic liquid were designed for the separation of chiral amino acids. These modified magnetic nanospheres were effective in a direct chiral separation of five racemic amino acids (D- and L-cysteine, D- and L-arginine, D- and L-leucine, D- and L-glutamine and D- and L-tryptophan). Furthermore, a new online method for complete separation of the enantiomers via the magnetic nanospheres was established with centrifugal chiral chromatography using a spiral tube assembly mounted on a type-J coil planet centrifuge. One kind of chiral compounds, D- and L-tryptophan was resolved well using this method. These results demonstrated that the modified nanospheres display a good chiral recognition ability, and can be used as a potential material for chiral separation of various racemates.