Chiral biobased ionic liquids with cations or anions including bile acid building blocks as chiral selectors in voltammetry

Chiral ionic liquids CILs, or ionic liquids ILs with chiral additives, look very attractive chiral media for enantioselective electroanalysis, on account of their high chiral structural order at the electrochemical interphase. A family is now introduced of molecular salts with CIL properties, based on the chiral steroid building block of deoxycholic acid implemented either in the anion or cation. Testing them as chiral additives in a commercial achiral IL, they enable voltammetric discrimination of the enantiomers of a model chiral probe on disposable screen printed electrodes in terms of peak potential differences, the most desirable transduction mode of the enantiorecognition event. The probe enantiomer sequence is the same for all selectors, consistently with their sharing the same chiral building block configuration. This proof of concept widens the application fields of bile acid derivatives as chiral selectors, while also enriching the still very few CIL families so far explored for application in chiral electroanalysis.