Studies on a new class of organogelator containing 2-anthracenecarboxylic acid: Influence of gelator and solvent on stereochemistry of the photodimers

A new class of binary organogelator (G1, G2 and G3) based on 2-anthracenecarboxylic acid (2Ac), attached noncovalently with the gelator counterpart containing a 3,4,5-tris(n-dodecyloxy)benzoylamide backbone has been developed. Among the three gelators, two (G2 and G3) are chiral containing d-alanine or l-2-phenylglycine moieties, respectively. They can act as efficient gelators of organic solvents with varying polarity depending upon the gelator systems. Gelator G1 even gelates chiral solvents. The photoirradiation of the gel samples produces photocyclodimers having different degrees of stereoselectivity for different systems. Gels with G1 and G2 produce head-to-head (h-h) photodimers as major products, whereas the stereoselectivity is reversed for the gels with G3 producing head-to-tail (h-t) photodimers as major products. Among those, G2/cyclohexane gel shows the highest degree of stereoselectivity, producing only h-h photodimers with some significant amount of chiral induction. Other chiral systems exhibit low to moderate chiral inductions. The gelator G1 can differentiate between the racemic and enantiomerically pure varieties of a solvent by exhibiting different gel melting temperatures (T_gel). For different gel systems, T_gel increases in all the cases as a consequence of photoreaction, except for the G2/cyclohexane gel, where a prominent gel-to-sol phase transition can be observed during the photoreaction. Hydrogen-bonding and π-π stacking interactions play the principal roles in constructing the gel structure. The morphologies of the gel systems vary between one-dimensional fibrils and a fibrillar network structure. In addition, the influences of the gelator and solvent polarity on the rate of photoreactions, photoproduct distributions as well as gel structures are investigated.