A novel type of chiral molecular tweezers has been designed and synthesized by linking benzoyl and chiral unsymmetrically disubstituted urea unit to 3-position and 12-position of rigid methyl deoxycholate. Their structures were confirmed by 1H NMR, IR, MS spectra and elemental analyses. The recognition properties of these molecular tweezers for neutral molecules and D/L-amino acid methyl esters have been investigated. The results indicate that these molecular tweezers not only recognize neutral organic molecules well, but also have good enantioselectivity for D/L-amino acid methyl esters.

Key words: molecular tweezer, synthesis, chiral unsymmetrical urea, deoxycholic acid