One‐dimensional TOCSY 1H NMR experiments on adducts of amino acid esters with cobalt(III) tetramethylchiroporphyrin. Prospects for the analysis of amino acid mixtures

Cobalt(III) tetramethylchiroporphyrin, CoCl(TMCP), is a useful chiral shift reagent for structure attribution, absolute configuration assignment and enantiomeric excess determination of amino acid methyl esters by ¹H NMR spectroscopy. However, it has two axial sites available for amine coordination, a structural feature which generates n(n + 1)/2 diastereomeric species and n² distinct spin systems from a mixture of n amino ester enantiomers, making the analysis of complex amino acid samples exceedingly difficult by classical 1‐D or 2‐D NMR methods when n > 3. The 1‐D TOCSY experiment is shown to be a powerful tool for the selective excitation and detection of every single component of a mixture of four amino acid methyl esters bound to CoCl(TMCP): those of(S)‐Leu, (S)‐Asp, (R)‐Asp and (S)‐Glu, for example. The potential utility of this methodology for the determination of amino acid enantiomers in carbonaceous meteorites or other extraterrestrial samples is suggested. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.