Fundamental Kinetic Studies for Understanding Chiral Separations in High-Performance Liquid Chromatography.

Chiral recognition is a very complex phenomenon which depends on the nature of analytes and chiral selectors. Indeed, only enantiomers with proper and specific spatial orientation are able to interact with chiral adsorption sites on the selector. As a consequence, under defined conditions, it could happen that enantiorecognition mechanism takes a long time, leading to a worsening of the chromatographic efficiency. To shed light on the specific phenomena at the basis of this strange behavior, and hence to increase our knowledge of chiral separations, kinetic investigations can be applied.