Enantioseparation of organometallic compounds and metal complexes by liquid chromatographic techniques. A review

Chiral organometallic compounds and metal complexes, and more recently metal clusters, have attracted great interest for applications in chemical, biological, medical, and material sciences. In these fields, liquid chromatography has been widely used for fast chiral analysis to determine the enantiomeric purity of metal-containing chiral compounds prepared by asymmetric synthesis, for quality control of commercial chiral metal catalysts, for accessing enantioenriched or pure enantiomers of metal complexes for various applications, and often as test probe analytes for screening the enantioseparation capability of newly developed chiral columns and chromatographic systems. With the aim to show what was done in this field as a useful guide for new applications, in this review the evolution of methods and approaches used to separate the enantiomers of chiral metal-containing compounds is described, showing how this field have been changed over time, from the 1970s until most recent studies. For this purpose, representative applications of enantioselective liquid chromatography for the enantioseparation of chiral organometallic compounds and metal complexes will be presented and discussed, indicating chiral columns, mobile phases, and chromatographic conditions which have been used to obtain successful enantioseparations in this field.