Highlighting the possible secondary interactions in the role of balhimycin and its analogues for enantiorecognition in capillary electrophoresis.

It is believed that the enantiorecognition mechanism based on macrocyclic antibiotics involves multimodal interactions via hydrogen bonding, pi-pi interaction, steric hindrance, hydrophobic interaction and so on. A variety of enantiomeric N-benzoylated amino acids were separated using balhimycin (A) or its analogues bromobalhimycin (B) and dechlorobalhimycin (C) as chiral mobile phase additive using a CE method, which combined the partial filling technique with the dynamic coating technique and the co-EOF electrophoresis technique. The enantioresolution and the migration time were highly relevant to the structure of analytes, especially to the substitutions on the N-tagged benzoyl moiety of the amino acids. A steric effect and pi-pi interaction based mechanism is proposed in order to explain some observed enantioresolution differences between positional isomers. Notably dechlorobalhimycin exhibited the best enantioresolution for several N-benzoylated derivatives of leucine, which was rarely observed for N-dansylated amino acid derivatives. The hydrophobicity difference of the aglycone pocket among three chiral selectors was assumed to account for this behaviour.

Highlighting the role of the chlorine substituents in the glycopeptide antibiotic balhimycin for chiral recognition in capillary electrophoresis.

The vancomycin-type glycopeptide antibiotic balhimycin (I) and its dehaloanalogue dechlorobalhimycin (III), which is characterized by the total substitution of the two chlorine atoms of I by hydrogen, were employed as chiral selectors for the enantioresolution of 11 racemic dansyl amino acids and six 2-arylpropionic acid nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory racemic drugs by CE. The observed enantioresolution capability of I for all test analytes is clearly higher than that observed for III. This result suggests that chlorine substituents of I played a major role in the enantioresolution of these test analytes. A dimerization-based mechanism is proposed in order to explain this phenomenon. The two chlorine substituents of each monomer, which mutually penetrate into the cavity of the adjacent molecule of the dimer, are assumed to promote dimerization and as a consequence also enantioresolution.