The research work reported in this thesis deals with the development of novel NMR experimental techniques for the spectroscopic discrimination of enantiomers dissolved in a chiral liquid crystalline medium. The information on the chemical shifts and coupling constants pertaining to each enantiomer has been derived on the investigated chiral molecules. The enantiomeric excess (ee), a parameter which is of profound importance in pharmaceutical industry and in asymmetric synthesis, has also been measured. A special attention is paid to the use of high sensitivity of H NMR for chiral discrimination. Typical analyses of H NMR spectra are severely hindered due to enormous spectral inhomogeneous broadening arising from too many unresolved transitions, in addition to superposition of spectra from both the enantiomers. Therefore, the major part of the work is focused on the design and application of pulse sequences to overcome many of these drawbacks. This helps to achieve very high resolution, discerning of overlapped transitions, identification of resonances pertaining to each enantiomer and simplification of the spectrum for easy extraction of spectral parameters, in addition to the accurate measurement of ee. Initially a brief discussion is provided on enantiomers, diastereomers, basic principles of NMR spectroscopy, the several interaction Hamiltonians responsible for yielding the NMR spectra, introduction to product and polarization operator formalisms that gives insight into the spin dynamics for designing appropriate two-dimensional (2D) NMR experiments. This sets the foundation to understand the complex multiplet structures of the diagonal peaks and cross peaks in the resulting 2D spectrum. Subsequently, a brief introduction is given for the available techniques for NMR spectroscopic discrimination of enantiomers in isotropic medium, where only chemical shifts are employed as a measurable parameter. The limitations of these techniques are circumvented by the introduction of other anisotropic NMR parameters, such as homo-and hetero-nuclear dipolar couplings, quadrupolar couplings and chemical shift anisotropies. To achieve this goal the enantiomers are dissolved in weakly aligning chiral liquid crystalline (CLC) medium. To understand this, a general introduction to liquid crystals and their utility as an alignment medium in NMR spectroscopy and the anisotropic interactions affecting the NMR spectrum has also been provided. The preparation of the CLC phase of Poly-γ-Benzyl-L-Glutamate (PBLG) employed in the present study and its orientational behaviour has been discussed. The detection of NMR spectra of various nuclei and the interaction parameters utilized for chiral discrimination will be enumerated. A brief summary of the experiments employed for the spectral analyses of the enantiomers dissolved in PBLG will also be presented.

Spin selective MQ-SQ correlation has been demonstrated by either selective pulses in homo-nuclear spin systems in isotropic and weakly orienting chiral media or by nonselective pulses in hetero-nuclear spin systems in strongly aligned media. As a consequence of the spin selective correlation, the coherence transfer pathway from MQ to SQ is spin state selective. This two dimensional approach enables the utilization of the passive couplings (remote couplings) to break a complex one dimensional spectrum into many sub spectra. Each sub spectrum contains fewer transitions and hence fewer couplings (active couplings). The role of the passive couplings is to displace the sub spectra and measurement of the displacements taking into account their relative tilt provides the magnitude of the passive couplings along with relative signs. Further possibility of a spin state selective MQ-SQ resolved experiment to determine very small remote couplings otherwise buried within linewidth in one dimensional spectrum has been demonstrated. The resolution of the multiple quantum spectrum in indirect dimension has also been exploited to separate the sub spectra. The technique renders the analysis of complex spectrum in isotropic system much simpler. The potentialities of the technique have also been demonstrated for discrimination of optical enantiomers and derivation of the residual dipolar couplings from very complicated spectrum. The second order spectrum in strongly aligned media restrict selective excitation, however in hetero-nuclear spin system the nonselective pulses on protons do not interact with the hetero-nuclear spins. Thus the weakly coupled part of a strongly coupled spectrum has been exploited for simplifying the second order spectrum and thereby its analysis. Thus several methodologies derived from spin selective correlation has been demonstrated. Enantiopure spectrum has been recorded from a mixture of R and S enantiomers by a novel pulse scheme called Double Quantum Selective Refocusing Experiment. The dipolar coupled methyl protons in weakly orienting media are utilized. The selective excitation of double quantum coherence reduces the three spin system into a two spin system and remote couplings are refocused which otherwise leads to broadening. The sum of passive couplings being different for the enantiomers resolution in the DQ dimension is enhanced and thereby their discrimination. Finally several decoupling schemes has been compared in the indirect dimension of HSQC experiment to resolve 13C satellite spectra otherwise buried within line width for increased confidence in determining hetero-nuclear framework information.