Recent advances on porous homochiral coordination polymers containing amino acid synthons

Natural amino acids are the basic building units and functional groups in biological organisms. Attracted by the unique properties derived from amino acids and their derivatives, such as chiral recognition and selective binding to substrate molecules, they have been used as building blocks for the construction of a variety of homochiral metal-organic coordination polymers (MOCPs). Given the fact that most of the natural amino acids do not have sufficient coordination donors and rigid backbones for the construction of higher porous MOCPs, several effective strategies have been therefore established to improve the porosity and rigidity of coordination networks containing amino acid residues. These homochiral MOCPs exhibit intriguing structural patterns and interesting properties, which have realized applications in a number of fields such as asymmetric catalysis, luminescence, adsorption, separation, magnetics, second-order nonlinear optics (NLO) and conduction. This highlight aims to give an account of recent advances on the synthesis and applications of homochiral MOCPs that contain amino acid synthons.