Use of Liquid Crystal Induced Circular Dichroism for Absolute Configurational Assignments of β-Amino Alcohols

Article abstract of DOI:10.1021/jo00161a005

Dissolution of small quantities of chiral β-amino alcohols in liquid crystalline N-(p-methoxybenzylidene)-p-n-butylaniline (MBBA) results in induced rotations due to the formation of a cholesteric (chiral) liquid crystal phase.The induced rotations are several orders of magnitude larger than those observed for β-amino alcohols in isotropic solutions, and the signs of these rotations can be correlated with the absolute configurations of the chiral amino alcohols when standard conformational analysis arguments and the preference of elongated molecules to align with MBBA are considered.