Synthesis and Characterization of a Chiral Dendrimer Derived from Pentaerythritol

The synthesis and characterization of a chiral dendrimer in its racemic form is reported. The chirality of this macromol., with a mol. wt. of 2831, is based on a pentaerythritol core, acting as a stereocenter with 4 dendritic substituents of different generation. The synthesis makes use of a newly developed, general route to a multisubstituted pentaerythritol deriv. Resoln. of the dendrimer is hampered by conformational flexibility. However, this allows detailed 1H-NMR characterization indicating the stratified structure of the dendrimer. Considerable resoln. of the 1H-NMR signals of the inner protons in C6D6 and C6D5N suggests that 1 adopts an overall chiral shape in soln. [on SciFinder (R)]