Chirality in Dendritic Architectures

A review with 38 refs. At first glance the topic of chiral dendrimers seems to be a contradiction in terms. However, recent studies reveal that both the building blocks of the dendrimer and the overall dendritic architecture can be chiral and that chirality can be introduced at various levels. The expression of optical activity in these enantiomerically pure dendrimers as a result of conformational (dis)order has proven to be of special interest. We present the different approaches to introducing chirality in dendritic architectures, organized through their possible impact in fields such as biocompatibility, catalysis, mol. recognition, and surface chem. Also, the relation between mol. chirality of core or building block and the macroscopic chirality of dendritic objects is discussed