Selective synthesis of helical polymers

Many researches have been done on synthetic helical polymers because of their wide applications such as chiral recognition, enantiomeric separation, asymmetric catalysis, circularly polarized luminescence, liquid crystallization and so on. Synthetic helical polymers can be generally divided into static helical polymers and dynamic helical polymers on the basis of whether the helix inversion barriers are high or low. And this mini review mainly describes the three common selectively synthetic methods of static helical polymers such as polymerization with chiral monomers, helix-sense-selective polymerization and enantiomer-selective polymerization. We hope that this mini review can provide more ideas on synthesis of chiral materials and encourage further development on novel synthetic methods of helical polymers.

Automated summary

This mini review discusses the common synthetic methods of helical polymers and their wide range of applications. By using selective synthesis, helical polymers with specific properties can be prepared.