Complexation of Chiral Zinc-Porphyrin Tweezer with Achiral Diamines: Induction and Two-Step Inversion of Interporphyrin Helicity Monitored by ECD.

We report here the synthesis of a new chiral Zn(II) bisporphyrin tweezer in which two achiral Zn(II) porphyrin moieties are covalently linked by (1R,2R)-diphenylethylenediamine, which produces a strong chiral field around the porphyrin moieties. The chiral tweezer exhibits not only intensity modulation in UV-vis and CD exciton couplets but also a dramatic change, namely, the inversion in the sign of the interporphyrin helicity upon binding of achiral diamines of varying lengths. The stoichiometry-controlled formation of a 1:1 sandwich complex followed by a 1:2 open complex was realized with smaller achiral diamines (n: 2-5) at their low and high concentration regions, respectively, leading to two-step inversion of chirality. With longer achiral diamines (n: 6-8), however, only 1:1 sandwich complexes are formed with no change of sign in the CD couplet. As compared to a 1:2 open complex, a 1:1 sandwich complex shows an enhanced CD response as two porphyrin units come closer in space. Structural insights of the host-guest complexes have been obtained spectroscopically along with molecular mechanics minimizations with the newly implemented OPLS-3 force field followed by geometry optimization using density functional theory of the most stable conformer. The amide bridge in the Zn(II) bisporphyrin has a low rotational barrier, which provides conformational flexibility to change interporphyrin helicity between 1:1 and 1:2 binding depending on the size of the achiral guests in order to minimize host-guest steric interactions.