We have recently shown that, as a result of its rigid cone-shaped structure, racemic SubPcs trisubstituted with peripheral amides can self-assemble in two distinct regimes as a function of the solvent environment.¹ In toluene, an apolar aromatic medium that can efficiently solvate p-surfaces, such compounds associate as tail-to-tail dimers (regime A). In methylcyclohexane (MCH), in contrast, they undergo a cooperative supramolecular polymerization process to yield non-centrosymmetric head-to-tail columnar stacks (regime B).²

SubPcs, being intrinsically chiral molecule, constitutes an ideal probe to study chiral self-sorting processes, which is the objective of this work. As depicted in the figure below, a racemic mixture of a trisubstituted SubPc can in principle self-assemble into different species. Homochiral dimers/polymers may form through a chiral self-recognition process: each enantiomer has a preference to aggregate with itself leading to helical supramolecular structures with a preferred handedness. At the other extreme, heterochiral dimers/polymers would be instead formed via a chiral self-discrimination process, where each enantiomer prefers to associate with the other, yielding purely racemic dimers/polymers displaying no predilection for a given helical sense. As an intermediate case, the enantiomers might show no strong self-sorting preference and yield statistical dimers/polymers.

[1] C. G. Claessens, D. González-Rodríguez, M. S. Rodríguez-Morgade, A. Medina, T. Torres, Chem. Rev. 2014, 114, 2192.

[2] (a) J. Calbo, J. Aragó, P. M. Viruela, E. Ortí, T. Torres, D. González-Rodríguez, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2015, 54, 2543; (b) M. J. Mayoral, J. Guilleme, J. Calbo, J. Aragó, F. Aparicio, E. Ortí, T. Torres, D. González-Rodríguez, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2020, 142, 21017.